


welcome home (shed your skin and expose your bones)

by JunkerJackrabbit



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Flirting, Biting, Consensual Kink, Consensual Sex, Eventual Smut, F/F, Multi, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, Sylvanas Loyalist, Terrible People, Threesome - F/F/F, Vintel is a cat, cheeky fucks, elf games, slaps hood - you can fit so many lesbians in windrunner spire, the dark rangers are also cats, top bottom or switch?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2021-02-11
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:53:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26897005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JunkerJackrabbit/pseuds/JunkerJackrabbit
Summary: Vintel had planned this adventure out in-between her first and second slice of toast this morning. It hadn't really included plans to fall out of a tree in the middle of the bloody Eversong. At least up until thatlastminute, anyway. But shehadsuspected that if she didn't, their merry little chase would have kept up well into mid-autumn, and she did want to be around for the Solstice decorating.Of course, there's also the fact that when Sunstrider asked her to tail the Farstriders, she hadn't expected that job to include catching theRanger-General of Silvermoontrying to have a cheeky tryst with a shut-in herbalist, either. That was just a solid perk.orHow Sylvanas gets two wives and then they all court Jaina
Relationships: Jaina Proudmoore/Sylvanas Windrunner, Jaina Proudmoore/Sylvanas Windrunner/Other(s), Sylvanas Windrunner/Original Character(s), Sylvanas Windrunner/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 60
Kudos: 106





	1. pull colour from the summer skies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rawrkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rawrkie/gifts).



It isn't truly a sense of duty that has the Ranger-General treading the leaf-scattered path toward the Cinderlight Spire late afternoon. Hardly that, in fact.

Were Sylvanas tempted to grant the sentiment a name, she would call it curiosity, or perhaps _escapism_. The result of another day of terminal, Kael'thas-induced boredom. His return to the city is of little note, but his insistence on entertaining the emissaries of the other kingdoms is all too frequently interfering with her business of recent. As if only the Ranger-General herself could provide the unnecessary security for the unnecessary banquet he plans to hold for an equally unnecessary human lordling. 

If it were not for Anasterian, there is little doubt, she's liable to have simply fucked off into the woods to patrol already, ignoring the request. But it has been quite a time since the king has seen his son, and there is a small, doggedly persistent part of her that is willing to entertain the former, if not the latter. 

The abrupt cancellation of the patrol around Tor'watha, several weeks in the planning with her rangers, has not helped and may or may not, in fact, be fueling her general sense of willfulness at the moment.

Still, perhaps the walk will do her good - the closest she's been to Eversong proper in several days. The leaves rustle softly in the breeze, masking her footsteps as she makes her way around small puddles and patches of mud from a midsummer rain, leaving no trace of her passage in a way that always instills a sense of pride in her. 

Dappled in the warm amber light that filters through the sun-gold trees, Sylvanas leaps up onto the mossy stones of a mostly-ruined wall rather than muck through the mud and the leaves, balancing easily on it as she scouts a better path around the outer walls. The gates are closed, which she suspects has _much_ to do with the conversation she hadn't-quite-not been eavesdropping upon.

Cinderlight Spire is an edifice of an older war, its architecture _dated_ in comparison to the remainder of Silvermoon and not wholly elvish, sheltered in the suntrees _just outside_ the city. Just enough to still be a little wild. She can't recall having visited it before, but has passed it several times on her way to or from the city proper. It is a modest enough little spire, on the lower end of what might be considered to house lesser nobility, and it's dawn-tinged stones provide just enough purchase for flamecap mushrooms to grow wild up the side that sees the least amount of sun. 

Gold paint is peeling from it in long ribbons here and there, around the windowsills, upon the intricately carved railings that ward the staircases to the upper levels. She had to scale a fence to find it, uncommon enough in the open-air architecture common in the city proper. Not that it provided much of a challenge. Stone, likely from the sun-lit river that winds lazily to the east, and at least three meters tall, it was still easy to scale with the aid of a nearby tree.

A part of her _hopes_ that this will live up to expectations, prove worth the impromptu adventure, but perhaps - looking out over the grounds from amidst the amber-and-scarlet leaves, the wind rippling in her tunic and making a mess of her pale gold hair, it already is. It's a challenge, if a small one. It's _outside_ , and not sequestered in another bloody meeting about place settings and security detail, as if the Amani intend to drop by during the seventh course for dessert.

Careful not to dislodge any of the stones, she steps over the moss and lichen-riddled rock and into the branches of a nearby suntree, continuing her way toward the centre of the property branch-to-branch amidst the ancient trees. 

The grounds are lovely, Sylvanas muses as she settles in on a low-hanging branch, back to the bark, and allows her dawn-grey eyes to fall half-lid, secure in the knowledge that she is well-hidden and certainly, no one would come looking for her here. 

_They are cultivated with the forest in mind_ , and there is a part of her that could love that. The way that wild honeysuckle winds up the dawn-gold trees, jewel-toned hummingbirds flitting amidst the soft blooms to sip at the nectar. The hushed buzz of the ebon bees as they drift lazily from blossom to blossom with yellow-tinged bellies, carrying their treasure back to the hive to conjure up sweet black honey.

Leaning her head back against the tree, she watches the grounds below and wonders absently if the Cinderlights would _miss it_ , if she took a comb or two with her when she leaves, wrapped up in a bit of waxed bark to have with hearth-warmed bread and a cup of tea later. It's secondary, wondering how long she can get away with being absent before it's called to attention, given the circumstances.

Kael'thas has been _beside himself_ with the whole ordeal. Not that she's wholly aware what the ordeal is in the first place. With a twitch of the ear, stooped over a map as she indicated the route for the patrol to take in her absence, she had caught _Cinderlight_ and _roses_ and _that thrice-damned **girl**_ , in response to the young guardsman who had delivered the report. She smirks at the memory, tilting her head to one side to watch a stick-insect make it's shuddering way down a nearby branch with too-long limbs.

She isn't overly familiar with the Cinderlights, to be honest, but they are proving to be an interesting puzzle.

It's a name of very little consequence, curious perhaps only for its dogged persistence and scarce populace, a house whose dawn waned well before the passing of it's matriarch and patriarch centuries ago. It would likely be of even less consequence if it weren't for its desirable tract of land and the collection of rare flora and fauna that it houses, or at least that's what Theron has told her. The house's eldest, Noas , has been under his command in the cadets for a few months now.

Sylvanas leans precariously from her perch to pluck one of the small, silver-white flowers from the vine, lifts it to her lips to taste the sweet hint of nectar at its centre. 

She always did like honeysuckle.

In many ways, Noas Cinderlight has proven to be a dead end. Stationed out in Fairbreeze Village at the moment, but she has seen him around the campfires on this patrol or another, always in Theron's shadow. An earnest enough youth with dark hair and slate-coloured eyes, he had an easy smile and laughed warmly with the other cadets, more sheepish than he wasn't. But it would take all the fun out of it to press him directly, and she certainly can't trek all the way out to Fairbreeze without an _incident_ at the moment. 

His sister, according to Theron, is the only other occupant of the spire near the Eversong. His sister, and from what she can see from high in the suntree - several hives of bees, a family of woodmice, not a few hummingbirds, and a lone silver dragonhawk coiled loosely in the uppermost branches. 

_The girl is just a gardener._

Which hardly explains, Sylvanas muses as she pilfers another blossom from the stem, getting a touch of pollen on her nose, why Kael'thas tends to look like one of the palace cats left a headless frog at the foot of his throne every time she's mentioned. 

She suspects, lounging quite comfortably in the tree as the sun starts to dip lower and lower on the horizon and starting to consider a nap, that it's unlikely that Morilinde of the Cinderlights has ever been _just_ anything. Gardener hardly seems appropriate for the grounds below. Beautiful, and - the ranger in her is swift to appreciate - _practical_ , in that they are cultivated around the needs of the forest beyond.

Symbiotic.

There are the soft marks of lynx paw-pads in the soft leaves and mud, more than a few empty nests sheltered high in the trees. When the breeze shifts through the leaves, it carries the scent of wood, of moss and earth, of leaves and summer blooms and good, green things. Of life.. 

Her keen, dawn-grey eyes can pick out hints of swiftthistle and wildvine, a touch of mageroyal near the fence, kingsblood in careful sections between the suntree roots, the petals washed blood-red in the slowly sinking light. The grounds are a sea of summer-red and fiery orange, sun-drenched amber and dawn-gold pink, bleeding into soft hints of cobalt and amaranthine as dusk looms on the horizon. 

Content for the moment as she is, slung back along a gnarled branch with her arms folded comfortably behind her head, Sylvanas has all but dozed off when the sun-bleached doors of the spire slowly swing open. Her ear twitches if only for an instant before dawn-grey eyes slip open to drink in her surroundings once more.

It isn't what she expected, having met Noas.

For slim and clad in smooth, hand-painted silks, an uncharacteristic choice for gardening, his sibling is the palest slip of an elf she has ever seen. A curtain of silver-white hair swept beneath the _most comically large_ hat in all of Silvermoon, and Sylvanas can almost taste the sun-ointment in the air, subtly floral and wholly ludicrous at this hour of the day. 

It amuses her. 

Almost as much as it does to pluck another honeysuckle bloom from the tree and savour the subtle sweetness of it, watching the other work in the roses for a time before she clears her throat softly and watches the other woman _start_ , then look up into the tree.

Those pale eyes _narrow_ , a trowel tossed back into its basket as the other rises to cross over toward the tree, and that's just _delightful_. She doesn't even have to say anything.

"What does _Kael_ want now?" and it isn't lost on her, that as soft and cool as that cadence is, like wind in the autumn trees, it is distinctly chilliest at mention of the prince. Morilinde of the Cinderlights, gardening in day-silks, and in the process of stripping off a pair of gardening gloves, looks fit to _pull her down_ from that tree. "And why are you _helping yourself_ to my honeysuckle?"

With a curl to the corner of her lips, Sylvanas drops down from that tree branch by branch, landing easily upon her feet not a foot from her. Sees the way that the other woman's head tilts back at that, as if not realizing from the distance that she's an easy _head taller._

_Pale as milk, with only the faintest hint of pink at the end of her nose from the sun_. All of her, if those pallid lashes and those eyes and her previous vantage point are any indication. Irises the silvery blue of the moon in the heavens. _She's pretty_. Slender. _Livid._

Morilinde Cinderlight cannot look her in the eyes for more than a few seconds before they avert, but come back each time, and _the newest_ hint of pink at the line of pale ears _isn't_ from the sun. _This could be fun._ She tucks it and several other sentiments away for later, thumbs hooked in her belt and an easy, if amused curl to the corner of her lips. 

"Kael?" Sylvanas' voice is summer-warm, carries more than a hint of a chuckle as she presses, "You mean the prince?"

An ear twitches at that, and the expression shifts, less taken off-guard and more subtly annoyed. as the slim shoulders stiffen beneath the silk and the line of that slender jaw tenses an instant before the other elf asserts, "I will call _Kael'thas Sunstrider prince when-"_

The sentence trails off, if only for an instant, and pallid eyes flick toward her fingertips as they catch a bit of silk and pull it back from where it's slipping from a shoulder, smoothing it carefully over the collarbone before withdrawing.

A hint of palest pink on those high cheekbones, and that's definitely not from the sun, an eyebrow arching sharply. Moon-white eyes lock on hers now without hesitation, that silken voice cool as it intones, "You can tell him-"

_None of Kael's guardsmen ever stood a chance, did they?_

She rests a forearm on the arbor, leans forward just so as she listens, her most attentive expression adopted as she tries - tries very, _very hard_ not to smirk.

_She just might._

\--

Morilinde was _not expecting company_ , and certainly was not expecting whomever is leaning against her arbor and has been _pilfering her honeysuckle_. It hadn't crossed her mind that _Kael'thas **bloody** Sunstrider_ may stop sending _guards_ and start sending...

She doesn't even know, but _she's_ **tall**. _Tall and sun-touched gold, like she was dipped in the Sunwell, with the leanest shoulders she has **ever** seen on a woman and eyes like a grey sky at dawn_. And if she knew what to do with that at the moment, she would do something other than consider that perhaps the way she has to look _up_ now and the other woman is too close, all but over-confidently looking _down_ at her _like that_ seems like a grave miscalculation on her part. 

_That won't do at all._

So her fingertips come to rest on that sun-touched sternum and press lightly between the loose laces of a tunic. _Belore_ , the thought is invasive, _She's warm to the touch._ Dawn-grey eyes flick down to where they rest, then back up at her curiously. So she tilts up a scarce measure, head tilted to the side to bring them a little _closer_ \- the soft fragrance of summer honeysuckle lingers, sweet and floral against the memory of sunlight and the cool crispness of leaves. 

She can feel the soft breath on her cheek, pale eyes never leaving dawn-grey as she asserts in a silk-smooth cadence, "You can tell Kael that this was a _much better_ attempt, but he can have at my roses when he pries them from my. _Cold. Dead. Hands._ "

And then she presses lightly, watching the other take that same half-step back, before moving to step around and ducking under the lean arm settled on her arbor. Her ear twitches, but her cadence is light and subtly teasing as she tacks on lightly, "And that his shoulder-pads are _beyond pompous_. I suspect we can all tell the little lord is compensating for something."

Summer-warm and melodic, the laugh that emanates from the taller woman is genuine, and a spark of mirth glitters in those dawn-grey eyes well before that lanky thing shadows her over toward the roses, not hesitating to kneel down and help her with a particularly stubbornly-rooted weed. She tries not to think about how warm it is when their shoulders brush, butter-soft leather to ivory silk.

"How did you know that I'd been in the honeysuckle, then?" that voice is all mellow amusement now, and with a palm braced to the earth and a strong pull of the shoulders, like drawing a bowstring taut, the offending weed is yanked free of the soil and settled into the nearby basket so it won't re-root.

Morilinde's touch is far less cautious than it should be, and she's intimately aware of that fact. So much less cautious, her pale fingertips a sharp contrast to the sun-touched skin of her visitor's jaw as she slowly turns the other to face her, not meeting those dawn-grey eyes until well after she's smudged the bit of yellow from the tip of a nose with her thumb, wordlessly revealed it.

And just as her touch starts to retreat, a stronger and dirt-gritty hand follows it, catches it to gently roll the pollen from her thumb into the smallest sphere. She stares at her wrist for far longer than she should, well after that lanky frame has risen and padded over to the apiary to leave a little offering for the bees. It isn't long before one of them takes the other up on it, trundling out of the hive to steal away with the gift.

When those dawn-grey eyes catch her watching, a brow lifts subtly, and Morilinde looks back toward her work to avoid lingering on the way the other woman's lips have curled up just so, as if she's revealed something she shouldn't have. And damn Sunstrider to hell, she has a **type**. It is not particularly helpful that that type is currently watching her with a vague amusement, lanky and lean in the setting sun, and dropped into her garden unannounced as if he knew what he was doing.

If he did, she'll go into Silvermoon proper and skin him alive with the trowel.

She tries not to notice when her type blows a strand of dawn-gold hair out of their own countenance as they crouch back down to her left, not hesitating to begin work on another root and ever-mindful of the thorns. Apparently staying for the time being, despite the lack of overt invitation. She doesn't mind that thought as much as she thought she might.

"Did you draw the short feather then?" Morilinde asks after a time, her smooth cadence echoing over the basin as they fill the watering cans. She skims the dawn-yellow leaves from the surface before submerging each one, filling them with cool rainwater from the previous eve. The sun has settled lower on the horizon now, dipped beneath the trees, and the White Lady is rising to take its place. "I hadn't expected any more guardsmen."

Her pale eyes flick up, hold dawn-grey as she asks, "Or are you simply the bravest of them?"

The shift in expressions is a journey. One that begins with the twitch of a long ear in the dying light, a momentary bemusement as the head tilts, and then her visitor's grey eyes widen faintly as if in recognition of some fact she cannot place. It ends with the slow curve of a mischievous smile, one that's all fox in the tall grass. 

"Certainly the bravest," comes with an equally quicksilver amusement, a pleased chuckle emanating from the taller elf as they move to take the watering cans from her, but linger. It isn't unpleasant save that she's looking _up_ again. A fingertip brushes her knuckle, and she knows without looking that that's intentional; their hands all but intertwined where they stand. 

And this near, she can see those dawn-grey eyes with all too much clarity, the dawn-gold lashes that never quite veil them. The hint of charcoal that limns them, drawing out the depth of their hue - a colour that reminds her of rain in the summer, of a sky heady with the knowledge of a storm on the horizon. Undertones of campfire smoke, of oakmoss and balsam linger in this proximity, imbued into the fabric of the taller elf's tunic or perhaps into that dawn-coloured mane, and it's as wild a thing as it is _good_. 

She arches a brow, a gesture that doesn't quite ask a question, doesn't quite not. Remains still when the other's head dips down beside hers, near enough that she can feel the warmth of that form. Near enough that the breath stirs in her hair as the taller elf confides in a summer-warm timbre, altogether to close, "I've never drawn the short feather in my _life_ , Miss Cinderlight."

_I don't suppose you have_ , it's a flicker of a thought, like a moth's wings in the waning light. There's an instant in which a part of her thinks, that near - that it's _not close enough_ , and another that cannot rise to that occasion. One that will not show the softness of it's throat to the fox in its garden. Not yet, quite possibly not ever.

And that tall frame lingers with her there, if only for a second. If only like the sun lingered on the horizon, low and warm above the trees as if unwilling to relinquish its hold on the day. The thumb that traces over the back of her hand is still warm with it, before her visitor draws back, the warmth receding with her, and turns back toward the garden to tend to watering the plants. 

\--

She never intended to make this a habit.

The best of intentions.

Nevertheless.

It is some days later, and Sylvanas sits on the lowest step of the Cinderlight Spire, her long legs stretched out before her and damp from the grass, watching the fog start to drift in in smooth, silvery eddies from the surrounding forest. It's cool this late, as it often is even in summer, and her ear twitches at the sound of a dragonhawk calling in the distance, sharp against the soft peeping of frogs near the garden pond. 

Overhead in the branches, the lone hatchling she observed the first eve has long since uncoiled for the evening; she watched it glide out into the velvet dusk before the moon could draw too high. Off to hunt in the wood, likely. _Where she should be_. Where she would be, were it not for her Prince and King. Still, every call of the creature in the distance instills her with a certain jealousy.

But it is difficult, she's finding, to be wholly jealous with dirt under her nails and a trickle of sweat drying between her shoulders in the breeze, when she has a mouthful of rosewater and pomegranate confection from within the spire proper. The pastry is buttery and sweet, leaving a hint of coarse sugar and sea salt upon her palate in contrast to the subtle, floral notes of the custard and the tartness of its garnet-coloured fruit.

She drops the rest of it onto the tea plate she was given, brushing the crumbs from her forefinger and thumb while she contemplates the moment.

A brief reprieve from what seems an endless cycle of things to do in the garden, none of which she has found unpleasant and equally none of which her company hesitated to enlist her in. It has never been so clear that Morilinde Cinderlight has no idea who she is, and she doesn't know what rock the paler elf has been hiding under for the last five hundred years, but finds herself thankful for it. 

She had no sooner arrived in the garden, dropped down from the trees from the familiar path over the wall, than the pale slip of a gardener had looked up and walked over toward the small, slate-tiled shed. _And handed her a shovel._

It's _refreshing_ in ways she hadn't anticipated.

To be able to be _just anyone._

To know that the words that find her, the pleasant banter beneath the hushed whisper of the leaves, are genuine and not niceties layered between the silk and sharpness of Quel'Thalassian politics. There are all too many who would - and have tried - to bend the ear of the Ranger-General for any manner of reasons to do with her station.

Instead, she has spent the better part of the evening digging out a section of rich, black soil for the placement of a new sapling - purchased from a traveling merchant. As if this girl only interacts with folk to do with plants. And here she is, a new blister forming on her calloused thumb, looking up to take a cold mug of tea when the other woman returns from inside, settles beside her on the step to look over the newest transplant in contemplative silence.

It's subtly sweet with just a touch of black honey, tastes of dried fruit, of tea leaves, a hint of citrus. She likes it. Not quite as much as the bitter brew that they have around the campfire with the rangers, but a close second. 

"You ever going to tell me why the Prince is after your roses in the first place?" Sylvanas asks in a summer-warm timbre, settling the mug to the other side of her so that she can take another bite of pastry. 

_That hat_ abandoned to leave her hauntingly pale in the moonlight, Morilinde pauses in her contemplation of the tree to glance sidelong at her, a slip of silvery-blue eyes in the shadow of the trees. 

"It doesn't matter why he wants them," the words are carefully chosen, so as not to reveal something, but she doesn't know what yet. Morilinde takes a small sip from her own mug, then continues in that silk-smooth voice, "They aren't _for_ him. He shan't be taking credit for them."

“You could indulge me,” she points out from around a bite of pastry, a spark of mirth star-bright in her grey eyes. Nodding toward the sapling in the distance, she leans back on her elbows, almost reclined upon the steps as she looks up to tease smoothly, “Especially after making me dig half to Stormwind to plant that damned tree.”

A cool hand reaches out, light fingertips tracing a strand of dawn-gold hair back behind her ear in a gesture that seems like it should be too familiar for them, but never quite is. Morilinde’s hand falls back thereafter, comes to rest on a slender, silks-covered thigh.

“I _am_ indulging you,” that response is as cool and light as ever, eddies of fog rolling in from the forest. But there’s an upturn to the corner of the lips, and the silvery gaze that finds her is not half so chill as the voice, which turns lighter still - touched of a soft amusement as the other confides, “It’s a very rare tree, after all. You’re really quite privileged having seen it.”

A brief pause, and then, “Would you like more tea?”

_This girl._

"I'll fetch it," Sylvanas offers in a nonchalant timbre, lifting her lean shoulders in a shrug before setting one palm to the cool stone to push up from it. Striding up the next several steps without hitting all of them, she has her hand on the door's edge when she finds herself drawn to a halt - slender fingers wrapped into a fist in the wine-dark fabric of her tunic, preventing her egress.

There is a moment in which she recalls cool fingertips on her jaw, the pad of a thumb smudging pollen from the end of her nose. A strand of hair brushed behind her ear by too-pale fingertips. It is a curious sensation, this. None but her rangers in Silvermoon have been brave enough to touch her, and even then, it's a rare occurrence outside being right little shits around the campfire on patrol.

Dawn-grey eyes rise to meet silvery, and her brow arches in silent question of the act, but she does not move to enter. The hand eases it's grasp, but does not release.

"I don't allow strangers into my home," Morilinde intones ever-so-lightly, cadence cool but not barbed, and silvery eyes never stray from hers with the words. There's a faint humor to the admission, a curl to the corner of the other's lips that wasn't there before, almost coy, not quite.

A mystery she's becoming increasingly enamored of pursuing.

It tilts their interaction, has her settling into an easy stance, one that's becoming more a habit than it isn't. Her forearm braces on the threshold, leans her over the slighter elf, perhaps too near for the other's comfort if the tinge of pink at the line of those ears is any indication. Perhaps not, if the look she receives for it is. 

Sylvanas clicks her tongue softly to the back of her teeth, all too aware that the sharpest ones are on display with her smile as she asks, "But they're fine in the garden?"

And Morilinde always seems to know what her game is, lashes fluttering as the slighter elf plays back, a fingertip tracing down the front of her tunic to run along the line of her belt buckle, moonlit on the bronze metal, as if it were the most innocent thing to be done. 

A slip of a thing that looks at her through those snow-pale lashes and asks in a light cadence, "Did I invite you in at all?"

And that, she can work with.

Sylvanas adjusts slowly, tilting in near enough that it would take almost nothing to close that gap, measuring the way that the other doesn't sink _back_. Her keen senses draw in the fragrance of rainwater and sunlight, of fresh green things in the garden.

Her words are carefully chosen, a touch lower, immeasurably more forward, "Would you like to?"

This close, she can smell _roses_ and vanilla, dark soil, subtly floral and earthy and not-quite-sweet where it clings to milky skin and silken robes in like kind. 

There it is. 

A hint of petal pink that dusts the arc of those cheekbones, a hint of midnight in those silvery eyes. An open appraisal of her at that, all cool regard and the simmering something they've been playing at these past few weeks.

Still, it shocks her in some small regard when that slender hand wraps around her belt-buckle, cool knuckles brushed to warm skin where her shirt has edged up, and she's challenged this openly on her own game. 

Silvery eyes search hers, composed of so much argent and only the barest hint of blue. Never look away, even as that silken voice offers in its stead, "If you have a name, you may come in. Is that a sufficient… _invitation_ , guardsman?"

_Guardsman._

Sylvanas cannot help but to chuckle at that, a growl of a sound that comes from the throat. Her ear twitches subtly in amusement, her smile all fox-in-the-grass and impossibly bold as she asks, unwilling to relinquish the spirit of their game, "What do you think it is, Miss Cinderlight? Nary a guess?"

"That’s not an answer," comes the cool response, crisp, even a touch succinct as the other's head tilts to appraise her. Silken tresses fall over the slender curve of a shoulder like a river of a starlight, and her hand twitches at that, but she resists the urge to brush it back behind an ear. "Are you asking what I would call you?"

"Perhaps." Now she's curious.

Now her hand has come to rest above the other's hip, flesh and blood warm beneath hand-painted silks, and her thumb brushes over it in a slow stroke, unprotested. Because the focus is still upon her, silver to dawn-grey as if a midsummer night could meet the morning so gladly.

"A welcome respite," is the soft answer she receives, more open than she considered it might be in that silk-smooth cadence. And it reminds her of the hush of rain meeting the salt-sea near Windrunner Spire, watching autumn come home from the cliffs. "Stubborn. Impudent. Altogether too bold."

That elegant countenance tilts only just so, a silvery gaze darting to her lips for but an instant, then returning, and it would be easy for Morilinde to bring them together. Still, she can feel the soft exhalation made against her skin, and the way the words stir the ends of her hair as her counterpart confides in an altogether too sultry cadence for the teasing of, "Perhaps half-decent with a shovel."

_That_ has another chuckle in her chest. Has her fingertips pressed into that silk. Has her shift in instead, nose brushed to Morilinde's once, then twice when the nearness isn't protested. And their lips _should_ meet, but never quite do, because cool fingertips have found her jaw, and the kiss finds itself pressed to the pad of a thumb instead as the other sinks back _just so_ and presses it lightly to her lips. 

The devil is in those silvery eyes, holds her gaze with a hint of satisfaction.

And that thumb is still there, a matter she is keenly aware of when the slighter elf tips back in, placing a feather-light kiss to the back of it. So close. So close she can feel the warmth, almost taste it. Never close enough, her senses filled with the soft fragrance of rosewater and soil as the other whispers softly there, "I would call you not _swift enough, anarore_. This time."

Dawn-grey eyes find themselves searching all that silver, liking what they find there, infuriating as it is. And when that thumb chases the curve of her lower lip, as tender a gesture as she's received, the upper curls faintly - freshly - and she presses the line of her teeth lightly against that fingertip. A part of her wants to sink them in, taste copper. Another enjoys the attention altogether too much, a warm prickle beneath her skin when the paler elf traces the slant of an incisor, bolder than anything. 

_This fucking girl._

_Anarore_. And it would be Old Thalassian, wouldn't it? She searches the recesses of her brain for its meaning. _Sunrise_. Clever. And there are so many possibilities that dance there before she hears it, the smallest of sounds amidst the leaves - at the top of the stone wall, before she catches the hint of a shadow in the periphery.

It is gone as swiftly as it came, but leaves her with an intimate awareness that they are not so alone as she thought they may be.

Still, as that cool touch recedes - she reaches out, as if by instinct alone, to catch a slender wrist in one hand. To lift that hand back to her lips and press a kiss to the cool skin at the heel of the palm, chaste as anything in a way she does not _feel_. 

Her dawn-grey eyes hold onto silver for a long instant, and she tries, tries not to flick an ear in the direction of the sound that she heard. When she allows their hands to lower, they remain together, and she feels some small pleasure for how their fingers twine together idly as she admits in a summer-warm timbre, "I should return to Silvermoon."

The corner of her smile curls, more sly than it isn't as she ventures, "Come with me?"

And the laugh that she receives for that is anticipated, but silvery in its own right, pleasant and cool, but sincere by the moonlight as a rare amusement touches Morilinde's expression. That silvery gaze looks her dead in the eye as the other confides coolly, " _Never_." 

But then presses in like kind, a cool touch chasing over her knuckle, "Tell me your name?"

She can feel it linger on her warmer, their fingertips brushing and never quite withdrawing as they should. And it's tempting, but no. Not now. Not here. Not with eyes on them, certainly, that would know well enough if she stole away into the Cinderlight Spire until dawn. 

So she makes a counter offer, knowing it will be refused. One that's accompanied by the sly curl to the corner of her mouth and a glint of mirth in dawn-grey eyes, "Send me with roses, and I'll consider it."

"The _roses_ aren't for _you_ ," Morilinde answers with vague amusement in that smooth cadence, slender fingers twining with hers all the same - the slender elf drawing back to pull her along with her. Back into the garden, out past the rose bushes, out past the newly-planted sapling and the lilies.

And when Sylvanas is thrown out of the garden for her sheer audacity, it's with the chastest kiss on the cheek, cool and soft, lingering almost longer than it should and not become something more. 

It isn't with roses at all.

The blooms tucked in her shirt pocket are far smaller - star-shaped. They are clusters of sword steel-grey, of powdery blue, of ivory.

_Forget-me-nots._

She can live with that.

\--

Sylvanas had to be sure.

She has to be sure of _many things._

Chief among them, that the presence she sensed in the dusk-limned garden would sojourn away from it in her wake. Follow her. That it was not something far more sinister, far more indiscriminate in it’s choice of prey. That it was not the Amani, skulking well far outside Tor’watha for her liking. That there will not be a need for bloodshed, or at least, that there will not be a need for it yet.

It takes time to draw them out. Still, the air is brisk this late in the evening, and the wind whispers hushed promises within the leaves that soon, the clouds obscuring the moon overhead will break, and rain will come to the eaves of Silvermoon. She can smell it on the air, a dark earth-and-ozone that draws out the scent of leaves and bark, of lush, golden things in the wood. It takes time, but she relishes it - every moment of what starts as a slow-paced stride through the wood back toward Silvermoon and soon quickens its pace.

What becomes of it is a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse through the hidden reaches of the Eversong, a tour of all its secrets she loves best. The warrens beneath the suntree roots, where the rabbits nest, their eyes reflecting green in the hazy light before they dart down into the burrows. The musky caves where the lynx den down in the day, now empty that they may prowl the night. The bone-picked clearing beneath the dragonhawk roosts, careful to tread quietly, lest they carry one away.

She is _well aware_ that this is not where she is _supposed_ to be or _what_ she is supposed to be doing, but then, it’s a challenge isn’t it? And there are not so many challenges that any Windrunner worth their salt can back down from, much less when they also wear the title of Ranger-General. This is _her_ forest. She holds the advantages here, and she would sooner perish than be proven the less apt hunter of it, regardless of whether or not she was intended to be the prey.

It imbues in her a certain thrill when it is not swiftly ended, a certain pride and more so, a dangerous curiosity as to her pursuer. Not many, after all, would be able to shadow her for who knows how long without being spotted, much less keep up the breakneck pace and follow on the labyrinthine route she has taken through the fern and bracken.

Sylvanas Windrunner is _learning things_ in these late hours before dawn.

She is learning that she missed the forest more than she imagined, and that her shadow is not as accustomed to it as she. It’s subtle at first. The faint crackle of a leaf or branch underfoot that almost no one would be able to tell from the prowling of something nocturnal, far more native to the wood. The way they circle the long way around the bramble, as if uncertain as to whether or not the thorns are as deadly as they appear. 

She is learning that they cannot tell a healthy suntree from a rotted one, not the way that she knows that the mottled bark on the lowest branches speaks of dry rot, that it will snap underfoot if tested. 

When her shadow does, what tumbles out of those branches would land lightly on its feet if she allowed it.

_She does not._

Instead, her bow-calloused hands catch in loose fabric and she shoulders down with the momentum it lends. 

What Sylvanas _throws down_ on its back in the mud and fallen leaves is _not what she anticipated_. Lovely women don’t make a habit of hurtling out of trees at her feet, save for her rangers, and this is _decidedly not_ one of them. There’s a part of her that muses that that could be an interesting predicament to find oneself in, though Cinderlight doesn’t seem much like the tree-climbing sort. 

It’s almost a relief, this. In that it would have been far more likely but _far_ less interesting had it been one of her rangers sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong. Albeit that that would have been far more easily handled than...whatever this is.

_Not one of hers, indeed._ Almost even with her in height at a swift appraisal, with a lithe build that could certainly hold its own, keep pace on their jaunt through the forest. If she were to speculate, her shadow is more graceful in some ways than she isn’t, especially if that near-landing was any indication. _Agile_. Warm to the touch, when she takes two swift steps nearer as the other spits out a leaf, and presses a knee to either side of them in the dirt, her hand wrapping in the front of a _ludicrously_ low-buttoned ivory shirt to keep them where they are. 

“If you wanted me on my back, Ranger-General,” it’s not a familiar voice or even a particularly familiar face, and _that’s_ curious on it’s own. She knows most anyone in the most prominent circles of Silvermoon, and _that_ face would be distinctive, striking on its own, memorable among the masses. The cadence itself is a touch smoky in quality, but a lot honeyed, almost purrs the words out before it finds interruption in a soft wheeze and has to regroup, winded from the fall. “You could have just asked. I’m very accommodating.”

It’s not so much the statement as the wink that has an amused sound caught in the back of her throat. It reminds her of her rangers more than it doesn’t.

To be fair to her rangers, it’s incredibly unlikely that any of them would run around the Eversong in the dead of night in little more than leather boots - far better suited to cobblestone than mud and root - dark leather breeches that lace up the sides, and the breeziest shirt of linen she has ever seen. One that seems far more unbuttoned than prudent to keeping warm. Nonetheless, the ivory is a pleasant contrast to a sun-kissed complexion, if a bit dirtied with mud and leaves at the moment, much like the woman wearing it.

The other woman pushes up, if only onto the elbows, and blows a strand of honey-blonde hair out of their face as if the whole ordeal were nothing more than a momentary stumble. But the eyes remain as cunning as they do sharp, steel-blue like the folded metal of a well-kept blade. 

“You have me at a disadvantage,” is what she answers with, a warning sound made when they attempt to push up a little more.

\---

“You have me at a disadvantage.”

The words aren’t exactly accurate.

After all, Ranger-General Sylvanas Windrunner isn’t the one sprawled out in the leaves with the back of her shirt soaking through, is she? And she paid _good silver_ for this shirt. In fact, the merchant claimed the buttons had been hand-carved from a genuine shoveltusk horn. Which was bullshit, really. She’d run his sources for fun and they’re definitely elk antler, _but it’s still a very nice shirt._

It doesn’t matter that much, she supposes. She’d nicked the silver back anyway. And she can nick another shirt out of Kael’s closet just as easily. He has enough it’d be hard to notice - but he always does.

Vintel had planned this adventure out in-between her first and second slice of toast this morning. It hadn’t really included plans to fall out of a tree in the middle of the bloody Eversong. At least up until that last minute, anyway. But she _had_ suspected that if she hadn’t, their merry little chase would have kept up well into mid-autumn, and she did want to report in before Solstice. 

Of course, there’s also the fact that when Sunstrider asked her to tail the Farstriders, she hadn’t expected that job to include catching the _Ranger-General of Silvermoon_ trying to have a cheeky tryst with a shut-in herbalist, either. That was just a solid perk. Kael really had _no idea_ what was going on, and she wonders now what it was that made him think Windrunner was up to some sort of mischief. He had detailed with great drama - and more than a little vintage, after all - his vast suspicion of his _loyal subjects_ , as if the farstriders were about to hold a coup and steal the throne out from under him.

But then, Kael is always a bit unnecessarily dramatic, particularly when he’s in his cups. His coin is always good. Vintel does think he’s a bit overly salty about the Ranger-General in general, on account that his father favours her like the _son he never had_.

And technically, if you squint, he could be a little right. It’s no secret that Anasterian is fonder of the Ranger-General than he isn’t. But she’s also ninety-nine percent certain at this point that the only thing that Sylvanas Windrunner is trying to throw is a pretty little gardener up against the wall.

Well. And her on the ground, but that isn’t the worst thing that’s happened this week.

She might even be a little into it.

She did lose that game on purpose, after all. And the game had been _fun_ while it lasted, far better than dodging around on the rooftops listening to Lord Human the Third bemoan the terrible state of his marital affairs with his wife to his latest mistress. She had managed to get a bit of blackmail out of that and delivered it to the source that could cause the most mischief with it, chiefly Anasterian and _then **Lady**_ Human the Third.

It is always nice when you can get paid twice for the standard amount of work.

Maybe she can use the extra silver to get a new shirt. 

Her mouth tastes like leaf.

But the view is nice.

Some days it _really does_ come up all Vintel.

Today is one of them, given she has the unforeseen privilege of having fun at the Ranger-General of Silvermoon’s expense and also given the fact that aforementioned ranger is a _stone cold fox_.

“Seems to be happening a lot these days, if pale, pretty, and _covered in dirt_ is any indication,” is what she drawls out, slowly and with vast satisfaction, a sentiment offered with what’s positively her slyest smile. She knows too much, and there’s a certain pleasure in that. If the look on the taller woman’s countenance is any indication, Windrunner suspects that, too. Vintel flutters honey-gold lashes and assumes her most incorrigible expression, tucking a leaf behind her ear in a flourish and teasing lowly in a way that makes a hint of red alight at the tips of the other elf’s ears, “Is this what does it for you, or are you a icequeens only event, Sylv? Can I call you Sylv?”

“Absolutely n-” 

“It could be fun. Would you let _her_ call you Sylv?” the coquettish batting of her lashes _probably_ isn’t necessary, but she’s living her best life right now and it’s _delightful_ knowing that she had a part in making those ears go scarlet, even with Windrunner staring down with something between incredulity and exasperation. “She is…” the chef’s-kiss is _definitely_ not necessary, but it feels like the icing on the proverbial cake of this moment. “Maybe a _little_ bitchy, but you know. I’m into it. Looked like you _could’ve been_.”

She can see the wheels turning now, the taller elf calculating how much she knows, how long she’s been under impromptu surveillance. What she doesn’t expect is the way the Ranger-General’s head cocks to the side, or the way those dawn-grey eyes search hers for a long moment before the other asks abruptly, “Did Theron put you up to this?”

Vintel blinks once, slowly, and then it’s her turn to laugh, head tipped back into the leaves as her shoulders shake with it. _Theron_. No, they wouldn’t dare. Not since she caught him in the Sunstrider winecellars after a raucous night of festivities with the rangers. She hadn’t even narced, which was well worth the bottle of centuries-old vintage now sitting on her bedside stand.

Sunstriders won’t miss it.

She stretches, cat-like in the leaves and feels knees tighten on the outside of her thighs, as if she may attempt to make a break for it from here. Bluebell and cold metal, her eyes are half-lid when they catch the other’s, and she purrs, “What’s that information worth to you, Ranger-General?”

Tailing the farstriders is officially on the books as her _favorite job ever_. 

Gold like the first hint of sunlight in the early morn, blonde tresses spill around lean shoulders as the taller elf stares down at her, an ear twitching back in annoyance as the other intones, “I could always arrest you.”

“I _am_ very arresting, it’s good of you to notice,” Vintel retorts cheekily, folding her arms behind her head once more, as if this is where she _wanted to be_ all along. “You could certainly try, but I’d be out before you turned the key in the lock, and halfway across Silvermoon with the _sauciest_ field report.”

Sylvanas blows a puff of air at an errant strand, shifting it out of dawn-grey eyes, before peering back down at her thoughtfully. If she didn’t know any better, she’d imagine the other elf had started to relax a minute amount with the banter, more at ease of a sudden than not. Head atilt, the _Ranger-General of Silvermoon_ adds simply, as if discussing the weather and not making _dire_ threats toward her own wards, “It’s almost like you _want me_ to slowly roast you over an Amani troll fire.”

“Are you good with knots?” Vintel counters in a _wholly_ suggestive and no small amount _earnest manner_ , making a show of biting her lip for good measure. Not that she needed much encouragement to sell the point. “Going to show me what those _big strong shoveling hands_ can do?”

Her lips curl in a devilish smile, and she watches from behind honey-gold lashes as Windrunner attempts to decide whether to lean towards amusement, curiosity, or simply throttling her down in the leaves. 

“ _Belore_ ,” the response is a soft oath, one that falls from Sylvanas’ lips with seeming mirth and exasperation both as the taller woman settles back a scarce measure, resting her weight on Vintel’s thighs and looking down with seemingly more ease as she asserts with only half an attempt to mask a laugh, “ _You’re worse than bloody_ **Loralen**.”

“Ah,” Vintel remarks simply, keen eyes glittering slyly as she props up onto her elbows, a prickle of gooseflesh running over her as the air comes in contact with the soaked back of her shirt. With a cheeky wink and an altogether too sly look at the taller woman still settled atop her, she drawls out brazenly, “That one. You know, she has very strong hands. And she’s _much_ smoother than some of her superiors I’ve met. Maybe you could learn a little something.”

“Is that so?” the words are softer even still, but hold the low portent of a threat behind their timbre, seen in the slow shift of an ear, the subtle tilt of a head to the side, the shift of those lean shoulders as the ranger draws forward like a lynx prowling in the undergrowth, sleek and deadly in ways a hare couldn’t even imagine. “You see, I doubt that _very_ much, little shadow.”

She’s all too aware that she’s been backed into the ground once more, shoulders in the leaves, the flat of the other’s hand beside her head and the other winding subtly calloused hands into the hair at the nape of her neck. If she didn’t have gooseflesh before, she bloody well _does now_ , because everything shifted out of her favour as surely as it had been _in it_ , at the slip of a sharp, white smile as the hand in her hair flexes just so.

As it tips her head back subtly, exposing her throat in a gesture that speaks _volumes_ more than it doesn’t. What washes over her isn’t fear, but it dusts the arch of her cheekbones and the line of her ears in a hint of pink, makes her swallow hard, knowing that the other woman can see it. 

Vintel can suddenly feel her heartbeat in more than her chest, as if every little vein and nerve had quite suddenly been set alight. In that moment, she knows without a shadow of a doubt that the most dangerous thing to contend with in these woods is the Ranger- _fucking_ -General, and she likes that _much, **much**_ more than anyone in their right mind should.

It takes her almost a full minute to clear her throat, the iron-and-bluebell of her eyes heady as they meet that lighter, almost gold-grey. And her voice, well, that’s breathier than she’d intended as she answers, “If you want to practice, I’m all ears. Feel free to ravish me.”

She only half doesn’t mean it.

Holds her breath for half a beat as the ranger leans in nearer, over her, above her, ash-blonde hair falling around her in a dawn-blessed veil through which it’s hard to see the trees. She’s _warm_. This close, the scent that clings to those clothes is all forest and a hint of leather, and her mouth is dry well before that head tilts in to the side and she feels a warm breath in the shell of her ear, the soft click of teeth just shy of it that makes her shiver.

Her shirt isn’t the only thing that’s damp anymore, and that’s a _lot_ more than she anticipated for this little jaunt into the woods.

“No,” is the simple word murmured _far_ too close to her skin for that answer _to really be no_ , and it harbors a warm amusement, a sense of earned superiority that carries over into a smirk as Sylvanas settles back languidly, looking down at her with those dawn-grey eyes and altogether too much confidence for her own good. “I don’t think I shall. I don’t know who you belong to yet, after all.”

That _smirk_.

It remains, even as the Ranger-General simply rises to her feet, a faint amusement behind those eyes now as they look down at her.

“You really know how to get a girl hot and bothered, don’t you?” Vintel regains control of her senses _much_ faster than most would, but there’s not really any masking the way her ears have gone pink at the tips. She breathes out rather suddenly as she levers up to her feet, confiding as she picks a few leaves off her person, “I think I might have to observe the Farstriders a few more weeks to get the full breadth of the picture.”

“Provide me a hint, and I might allow you to,” Sylvanas counters just as easily, as if it wouldn’t be possible otherwise. 

_Challenge accepted._

“It’s a date, then?” Vintel all but purrs, some measure of her easy demeanor returned now, and it’s nothing but easy to catch the front of the other’s shirt in her fingertips now, tilt up to place a swift peck to the other’s lips before any objection can be staged to the matter. They’re soft and warm, a little chapped from the wind, and she can tell from the little inhalation that it’s a _surprise_. Near the corner of the ranger’s mouth, she murmurs simply, “Nice shirt.”

Sylvanas blinks.

And Vintel is _gone_ , only the impression in the leaves any indication that the other was ever there.

\---

It isn’t her favorite place by far, the apartment reserved for her in Silvermoon. It’s gaudy, for one, decorated in an abundance of claret silk and gold that would make a traveling dignitary _weep_ for the sheer opulence of it. But she’s never had it in her to redecorate it. For one, that would mean an investment in actually being in the city more oft than she intends to be on patrol, and that doesn’t suit her well at all. It makes her all the more nostalgic for the salt air, the cool wind, the hushed whisper in the leaves and the sea on the rocks of Swiftrunner Spire. 

Still, it’s a bit of a respite for her senior rangers when they stop through the city, and as she turns the key in the lock, smoothly slides open the door and enters the awaiting dark, Sylvanas finds herself thankful for that after another lengthy day of political niceties. A sense of normalcy amidst the needless splendor and peacocking.

There are soft, earth-toned leathers draped over the chairs, thick cloaks hung on the wall, a row of neatly lined-up boots near the door proper. 

_And a few bottles missing from her wine-rack._

One of them is empty on the table, and even in the near pitch-dark, she can see the lithe frame sprawled on the chaise lounge.

_Velonara._

Which means the other two that she can hear in the master bedroom, clearly feeling their cups and _each other_ , must be Thyala and Marrah. Some nights, it might tempt her to join them. Not tonight.

With a slow shake of her head and an almost imperceptible chuckle, Sylvanas pads around the edge of the furnishing to draw an autumn-hued cloak around the slumbering elf a touch further, moves the emptied bottle nearer the edge of the table, before heading towards the much smaller bedchamber in the easternmost corner. Her favorite one, if only in that it has a balcony that overlooks the city.

She has all but settled into bed, the windows open to allow the cool breeze in from the forest, carrying with it the scent of leaves and earth, when she notices it. 

Beside the small jar of forget-me-nots on the nightstand, the ones that she had Lirath enchant, and swore him to secrecy for after.

A single red leaf, hints of orange and yellow at the outermost edges.

Held beneath a heavy coin, gaudy as anything else in this part of the city. The Sunstrider family crest prominently faced up. Her ear twitches subtly, and she slides it to the side to inspect the foliage instead.

On the leaf, scrawled in the messiest penmanship she has ever seen:

_Thanks for the shirt._

She doesn’t need to check the wardrobe to know that it’s gone.

Briefly, as she reclines comfortably amidst the pillows at the headboard, rolling the coin over her knuckles in an idle motion, she wonders how her shadow looks in red.

Almost as much as she wonders why and which Sunstrider has taken such a sudden interest in her extracurriculars.


	2. living just to say goodbye

Vintel has always been good at playing games.

Orchestrating her intent out of little more than a bit of chaos and a whim. It's a trait that she first successfully honed on the marble-lined streets of Silvermoon and parlayed into full-time employment as an informant almost a century ago. It had been a good offer. One that paid much, much more than the Summerkinds had offered her to slip a knife between Anasterian's ribs, and continued to manifest coin well after a third of that house had been summarily executed for treason.

Years ago now, but she still remembers how she did it - sees the similarities as she surveys the Cinderlight grounds and seeks not the easiest, but the most hidden way in. Quiet as a mouse, she had scaled up the smooth exterior of the palace, quieter still as she crouched in the shadows to await the changing guard, moving from gauzy curtain to curtain like a trick of the light. Like a soft, spring breeze through the window.

It had been far, far easier than it should have been to climb the last little trellis covered in yet-closed morning glories, pad in worn leather boots to the side of her sovereign's bed.

What struck her first was not the room. It was not the king. It was not the lavish, gilded furnishings or the plush velvets in the colour of every jewel that ever existed, not even the enchantments that lingered in the ceiling overhead, illusioned to reveal the night sky even as a storm hammered down outside. Gooseflesh had prickled, uncomfortable beneath her wet clothes where they clung to her skin. It had been early spring, after all, as brisk and cool as the Eversong is like to get. But had never been the coldest she had ever been, and the promise of coin to fill her pockets was a siren call, meant warm lodgings and a full stomach for months to come, if not longer.

Back then, it had been hard to imagine what days could be like without going hungry.

_It was the sword she noticed first._

**Felo'melorn.**

Glittering in claret and gold, a blade the colour of fine wine dipped in molten sunlight had been laid to rest against the side of the bed, its pommel shifting from dark leathers to a rising phoenix in shimmering metal. It almost looked alive in the candle-light, until she realized that it was the blade itself, and not the latter that was _glowing_. On the stand nearby, a single, half-opened book. As if King Anasterian had read himself to sleep by the light of a sword.

That was the second thing that Vintel had noticed that night. That Anasterian Sunstrider, for all the Summerkinds and their co-conspirators seemed to fear him, looked like any other old man. Without his crown, moved from his throne room, he could be anyone's grandfather in slumber, an angular countenance softened with smile lines at the corners of his mouth, hawkstrider-feet at the corners of his eyes where they must have crinkled so often in laughter. Streaks of white in the pallid blonde of his hair at the temples, sweeping back. More white than blonde.

Little more than a kindly old man, and by so many accounts, a fair king. A dangerous one, whose ambitious political maneuvering and open dealings with foreign nations could doom them all, if you listened to others. The Summerkinds had a list of perceived slights she had only half-listened to back then, the last of which had been Kael's acceptance into Dalaran, rather than continued service within the Magisters.

They had called it thwarting tradition.

Vintel honestly couldn't have given a shit for their reasoning, even then, beyond the hefty sum of coinage that would accompany her task, but it was always good to know that sort of thing about your employers before you sell them out. Still, she had been careful. She had moved that blade out of arm's reach, avoided the subtle wards scattered near the bed as Anasterian murmured something in his sleep about the price of honey and the last season's vintage. And when clearing her throat softly had failed to wake him, she'd _kicked the nightstand_ , which made him sit upright at the speed of light.

When he'd jerked awake, his sky-blue eyes had searched for her in that darkness, a subtle gleam against the night. And when they found her, he had never been less what she expected of him. For there had been no fight. No call for the royal guard. Nary a movement, nor a spell, nor a twitch of the fingers.

Only a bemused, if wise smile, and a fond look toward the portrait of a long-gone woman on the far wall, as if knowing he may be soon after her. As if this were an eventuality that he had seen coming and made his peace with a millennia ago. She remembers, even now, how the King of Silvermoon rested comfortably amidst his plush, velvet pillows, looking at the young assassin come to end him - sodden wet and shivering in the dead of night with one hand curled around the hilt of a blade, but not yet ready to bring it to bear.

_You wouldn't kill an old man in his sleep, now, would you?_

That's what Anasterian asked her, his voice still rusty from sleep, his snowy eyebrows quirking just so, and it had left her with the unsettling sense that he could see _through her_ , see back through the years to the very start. That he knew about the sleepless nights in the hawkstrider stables, the ones spent lonelier still in the corners of alleyways, hoping not to be kicked by the guard, the ones in which she nicked her next meal from merchant tables while they weren't looking.

How often she had to go without if she wasn't quick enough, clever enough to get away with it.

_She's never particularly liked that about him, even so many years later._

Her response had been what it always was. Cheeky. A shrug of the shoulders, one long ear cocked to the side as she'd observed, _You look pretty awake to me, my Lord. Unless you're sleep-talking. Quick. Say something else._

The lines around his eyes had crinkled further at that.

And then he'd invited her to stay for tea.

Not many people are that nonchalant in the face of their own end, but then, Anasterian has always been a bit of a peach. 

And it had been the beginning, after all, of their rather beautiful working partnership, at least after she'd assisted in tightening up the palace security and rooted out the last remnants of Summerkind sympathizers in the city for him. Being an eye for the crown, it turns out, is far more lucrative than a mercenary gig, even if it doesn't sound as tough. 

Well. That and Anasterian won't let her call herself the royal assassin, because good kings don't need assassins. Which is categorically untrue at this point, given the amount of times she's put her blade to use to prevent someone using one on _him_ , but then. She's not about to argue the finer points of that with him either.

Anasterian had once told her that he prefers to stay at least two steps ahead of his enemies, and three ahead of his friends, but Vintel? Vintel prefers to stay about _fifteen_ ahead of _everyone_ , armed to the teeth with the most crucial sort of ammunition: information.

This? Her fingers finding the gaps between the sun-warmed stones as she scales the outer wall of Cinderlight Spire? Cakewalk. She still did her research. How could she not? It hadn't been that difficult to peruse the records in this magister's house or that magistrix's, to find, amongst other things, that not a few of them had thrown a proverbial _book_ of disciplinary actions at the heir of Cinderlight for anything from fraternization with other nations - and one account of fraternization with a magister's daughter - to unauthorized use of unstable arcane foci and at least a few entries that had just been _redacted._

Some records, in particular Magistrix Eredenia's, had been a touch more...fond, in scripting. But she suspects that has more than a little to do with the small selection of rare flowers she had found in the study, carefully pressed in glass and labelled in a precise hand. She wouldn't have expected that Morilinde _'Ice Queen_ ' Cinderlight would have been _hot for teacher,_ but the short stack of letters she found tucked away in the safe behind the display had been a bit telling.

She's learned quite a bit in the endeavor.

One, that Magister Dar'Khan is a bit of a xenophobe.

Two, that Grand Magister Belo'vir is _really_ not fond of catching anyone with his daughter.

Three, that Magistrix Eredenia has a _stellar_ ass, and Four - that Morilinde of Cinderlight is quite aware of what she prefers, what she doesn't, and isn't shy about voicing those opinions, even to the detriment of her future within the magisterium. Especially, it seems, to the detriment of her future within the magisterium.

Popular opinion within the Magisterum seems to be that after the fifth had tried, most of them were more inclined to try their luck swallowing broken glass than taking the Cinderlight girl as an apprentice. And she hadn't seemed that bad, really. Not _that_ bad.

She hadn't quite been able to dig up _exactly what_ transpired that the girl was rooted right out of apprenticeship, but it's starting to look like some bad blood between Cinderlight and the Prince, fathoms deep and as old as anything.

Anasterian had been _by far_ the most fun to chat with about it in the late hours of the day, Vintel perched on an arm of the throne as they shared a tin of biscuits she'd found on her travels. He'd been the one to detail the lineage of the family, it's current heirs, their land and titles. That while the twins...were they twins, now? She can't remember. That while the siblings' parents had both been formidable arcanists, the mother had been in line for magistrix before her untimely death.

He had not, between his third and fourth bit of shortbread and being the absolute treasure that he is, withheld that the pale slip of a girl now inhabiting Cinderlight spire had once slapped his son so hard that Kael'thas had endeavored to have her held for assault against the crown. She read between the lines, and between his words. If the charges had not been pressed, it had been because _Kael deserved it._

Sprawled atop the stone wall like a cat in the sun, Vintel folds her arms beneath her chin and simply observes the comings and goings in the garden for a time, mulling over her thoughts. The sun feels nice on her back, almost worthy of a doze, but she doesn't want to accidentally plummet into the rose bushes and catch a face full of thorns, either. She's just biding her time, pondering the next move on the board.

She'd done a bit of recreational trailing of her favorite Ranger-General this morning in between other snooping, and it hadn't gone without notice that Windrunner had visited the market, or what had been purchased there. Bread. Cheese. Fruit, and a few other sundries. A rather nice bottle of wine, too costly for a guardsman to idly purchase. _A quaint little basket._ Everything one might need for a charming picnic beneath the suntrees on a lazy summer afternoon.

Steel-blue eyes mark the position of the sun, fall back to the grounds beyond the wall. If she's done her maths right, she has about two hours before tall, sun-drenched, and criminally handsome stops by the garden.

Vintel _can't wait._

To be honest, she doesn't _really_ intend to. It's far more than enough time to introduce herself, play a little game of her own, not to mention the careful loading of that deck she'd done this morning by borrowing a little box of fine tea from the Prince's room. She'd no idea why he had it tucked away in the wardrobe behind his neat stacks of freshly-tailored clothes, but it's hers now, and so is one of the nicer shirts. It looks _much better_ on her, as most things do anyways.

She's probably getting it dirty laying on the wall like this, Vintel muses, abruptly rolling off the side of the structure to land lightly upon her feet. Ah. Only a little lichen, and that's easily brushed from it. The dark blue of the silk more than suits the sun-gold of her complexion, and the hints of embroidery, phoenixes rising in silver and gilt, only serve to compliment it. Also doesn't hurt that she's left it unlaced almost to the navel, the forest air cool against her breastbone as she makes her way through the peaceblooms into the garden proper, balancing on the edge of the pond there before making her way toward her mark.

It's hard to remember sometimes that she's done this under far, far more ominous circumstances than simply flirting with a pretty girl or two. And, _**Belore** , she is pretty_. Vintel has bets that her hair is soft as silk and is probably insured for a thousand gold. She's prettier than the portraits she's seen of young Lor'themar, and that's saying something, because before he packed on his farstrider muscles he could have had half of Silvermoon lined up just by batting his eyes.

 _Belore, and she's so fucking pale._ Almost as if she weren't quel'dorei at all, but perhaps a vengeful ghost playing at one. Vintel pauses where she is, one hand wrapped around part of a trellis, and leans precariously forward to observe the other elf fussing with some manner of...flowering shrub? She's not really sure, but it looks bristly, and the flowers are a soft pink ringed in dawn-touched yellow. It's a lot like watching the angry phantom of a palace landscaper have it out with a topiary from this distance, soft oaths in Old Thalassian and all.

Albeit, a very attractive phantom, who is somehow managing to look drop-dead gorgeous - ha - in those silks, and seems possessed of a permanent case of resting bitch face. Ironic, given that Silvermoon exists in a state of perpetual spring, that the look Cinderlight is leveling at her uncooperative shrubbery is _the dead of fucking winter._

She waits for another second, until she's certain that the other's attention is focused, and then steps through the bramble, careful to avoid anything that may give away her approach. Her soft leather boots are soundless, quiet as cat's-feet until she's so close that she can pick out individual snowdrops painted on those silk robes. Her fingertips twitch with a desire to touch them, but she doesn't. No.

But it has drawn her close enough that, as she leans precariously over the shorter elf's shoulder to scrutinize what must be a particularly offensive shrub, Vintel can smell the fragrance that clings to that milky skin, subtle in its notes of rosewater, of vanilla, of a hint of dark earth after the rain. She smells good, and that's distracting. 

Not distracting enough to give up on her game, and she blows a puff of warm air against the column of a marble-white neck before dropping her voice into a teasing purr of, "Well, well. If it isn't the loveliest petal in the garden."

She should feel bad. 

She _really should,_ almost does when an ear flattens back against the other woman's skull and that slim frame goes still, but never quite finds it in herself to. Because while the jest was terrible, her delivery was _flawless_ , and her lips are curling even now into a mischievous smile because of it.

It's a smile that's all wicked mirth, reaches the steely blue of her eyes as Cinderlight starts like a doe in the woodland, and doesn't fade even after the gardener _has turned on her_. She's delighted. It's obvious that the other woman is mostly shocked, in the way those moon-silver eyes are a little wide, a little wild, more than a little taken aback and then _a lot angry._ In the way that a hand has risen, the hint of pink already dusting the arc of cheekbones and the line of the ears. 

Morilinde's fingertips glow with a soft hint of the arcane, and she supposes that that should alarm her more than it does.

What it does is make her wonder exactly how hard this girl slapped the prince.

And whether or not it left a Kael'thas-sized crater somewhere in Silvermoon she should know about.

 _It makes her want to press her luck_ , so she does, wrinkling her nose playfully and ducking in a scarce measure closer, as if the appropriate means of talking to those smaller than oneself is to get on their level. It's probably not by continuing to flirt, but that's not going to stop her at all.

"Hello lovely," Vintel drawls out more softly still, the corner of her lips quirking up a touch further when those silvery eyes sweep over her features and the hint of colour in pale cheeks intensifies. The ears twitch in annoyance, maybe in anger, both back against the skull now. Her cadence is crushed velvet as she gazes down, steely eyes and honeyed lashes, "What's a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?"

She's laying it on too thick, and she knows. But oh, there's something _immensely satisfying_ about the way that the other woman has no idea what to do with her right now. In the shuddering exhalation as the startled gardener attempts to regain some semblance of composure, and the narrow-eyed look that follows once she has, one that speaks volumes more than a blade between her ribs ever could.

Silvery as anything, that gaze drifts down to the blossom still in one slender hand, but broken off amidst the scare. It's frost-rimed petals are fragmenting from the cold emanating from those fingertips, and when Morilinde forces it back down to her side in a stilted gesture, the bloom drifts the rest of the way to the ground, where it shatters into flecks of white before melting into the soil.

And then that silver meets steel, a split-second of thought flickering, unknowable, across those elegant features before that hand darts back up to grasp her by the ear, a gesture that catches her attention in more ways than it doesn't. Sends a sharp spark of adrenaline, and then something else entirely, molten and warm, through her as she's draw a scarce measure further down, almost nose to nose as Morilinde enunciates in a cadence as cold and tempest-tossed as the winter sea, "Contemplating _regicide_. How many more _guardsmen_ should I anticipate in my garden this month?"

The words sound bitten out, a voice like smooth silk frosting over with winter's rime, but none of that cool anger so much as touches the other woman's countenance now. She can only see it in the eyes, hear it in the voice, more subtle than it isn't after a moment's lapse.

Vintel doesn't know what else is being said, really, because between that last little hint of pink in the cheekbones and the softer hue that marks the curve of those pale lips, and the _bloody ear_ still held fast between those chilly fingers as she's getting a stern talking-to in the middle of nowhere, she's well distracted. And maybe a little hot and bothered, but she's not going to say that. But somewhere between the second and third round of inquiry that she isn't paying attention to, she has the wherewithal to announce for the other's benefit, "I'm not a guardsman."

It's a cheeky thought. 

Impulsive. 

It's one she shouldn't follow through on, Vintel thinks. 

Of course, that occurs to her about two seconds before she tilts in just so, and her lips brush softly to the corner of the other's just for the hell of it. Which is nice, but also _terrible_ in it's own way. Because there's a sharp intake of breath at that, a flutter of snowy lashes, the fucking _perfect instant_ in which the other woman doesn't draw back and she can do it _better_ , softer, at least up until she draws her teeth over the curve of a lower lip. 

But the hold on her hasn't let up, becomes more firm instead, and that combined with the cool touch to her bare sternum makes her shiver, realizing that the gardener must have reached for her shirt and come in contact with sun-warmed skin in its stead. It's a thing that tilts out of her control, and she likes that, both the unexpected and that shared moment in the garden. As cool as that touch is, the slender elf is warm this close, and Vintel is more than a little enamored of the way her ear is being used to direct her, all the little ways she's reminded that she's lost the upper hand in small increments.

Particularly when a slender thumb runs the line of it, and on the inhalation that elicits from her, Cinderlight kisses her back _like that_. Slow and _intent_. Because now she has the exceptionally _damning_ knowledge that Morilinde tastes _exactly_ as good as she smells, like rosewater and vanilla, and that's as much trouble as it is a fucking _delight._

It's worse when she realizes that her shoulders have made contact with the trellis, all cool foliage and the soft, floral fragrance of morning glories in the early afternoon sun, because now there's nowhere to go, and she likes that much more than she's willing to admit with the tables turned. 

If she had been Magistrix Eredenia, she just might have swallowed that broken glass to keep her apprentice.

It doesn't tilt that last little increment of out of her control until she presses her luck, until her incisor catches a lower lip in a sharp nip, encouragingly, and hears a soft gasp for it. But there is one instant in which she thinks she may have gotten away with it. Just one, in which a hand splays on her sternum, and fingertips brush the underside of her breast, before that hand is used to push just so slightly away from her.

Vintel doesn't realize that the hold on her ear has been released until she's abruptly slapped, not half as hard as she could be, but with enough of a sharp _**crack**_ to have garnered the whole of her attention. Which is a feat at the moment, because she knows exactly what she would rather be doing right now. Or who, in this instance, their pale hand still pressed to her sternum.

The other reaches up to brush the underside of a bitten lip, a hint of pink to its paleness where the incisor pressed, and now those silvery eyes have gone contemplative behind white lashes, as if measuring their interaction by some unknown means. When they flick up to her, it's hard to look away from them. And the Old Thalassian accent that bleeds into the words is _strong_ , strong enough that she wonders if that's what the other woman grew up speaking, when Cinderlight finally voices in that silk-smooth cadence, "Do _not_ bite me."

_Belore, does she love women._

Vintel clicks her teeth together softly, impudently, and smirks when a slender hand rises once more as if in warning. She doesn't press further, her bet that Cinderlight's backhand is as sharp as the front, but she does laugh quietly to herself, allowing her head to fall back into blooms on the trellis. They smell good, floral and sweet with hints of green. The sun is warm where it dapples through the trees, and she can taste rosewater and vanilla on her palate.

It's an excellent day. 

Her gaze remains half-lid as a cat's, smile no less pleased than one as she asks, "Why not, petal?"

Silvery eyes flash dangerously in response, but that countenance remains cool, even as she's scrutinized carefully. She expects several things by way of answer, perhaps that the other elf bruises easily, skin pale enough that any mark left would be prevalent. Perhaps that the gardener is a touch too...what's the word she wants? _Vanilla_ , for it. 

What she expects less is the way that slender hand catches her firmly by the chin, holds it to ensure that their eyes remain locked, silver and steel in the early afternoon light. What she does not expect at all is the way that a brow slowly arches, the way that that silk-smooth cadence asserts for her as simply as if it were anything, "Because I told you not to, kitten."

As if that were the only explanation that she needed. 

It makes her mouth a little dry, quirks the corner of her lips a scarce measure further, makes her ear twitch in a way that she worries is too easy to read, and at the knowing look in those silver eyes, _is_. 

"Kitten?" Vintel asks with a dry amusement as those hands withdraw from her slowly, lingering if only for a moment. But now they're busied with turning up the sleeves on a silk robe, fastening them at the elbows so that that slip of a girl can turn away from her and tenderly inspect that vine once more.

"Is that not what you are?" the response falls in a soft, smooth cadence, a sidelong glance turned to her as the other elf smooths the broken-off stem of the vine. "Sneaking over my garden wall to pad about in the catmint and cause mischief? It suits you, I should think."

Is that what's underfoot? Bluebell and metal, her gaze shifts toward the ground, and she lifts a softly-soled leather boot as if that may answer her question, perhaps unmake the treads she's left behind in the lavender-and-amaranth blooms. As if it might undo the soft impression she's left in the morning glories, the fragrance of which remains on her shirt long after she's pushed out of them to slide an arm around the smaller woman's waist.

No protest to that falls, nor for the way that Vintel rests her chin on a slender shoulder, merely watching the quiet tending to the vine with a vague fascination. She likes this girl. She can see why Windrunner, of all people, likes this girl, who is at once nothing she expects and unlike anyone she's met in Silvermoon.

"Mm," Vintel's ear shifts to the side to avoid the path of a lazily droning bee, but she remains as she is otherwise, her steel-blue eyes half-lid as she draws in the soft scent of rosewater and vanilla. "The wall. Would you _really_ want to keep me out?"

And as silvery as that cool regard may be, the laugh that follows it is even moreso, a soft melody that reminds her of the distant chiming of the bells in Silvermoon for the setting sun. Morilinde's response harbours a vague amusement, only just touching the subtle accent to those words, "I do not even know _who you are_."

"Vintel," is what she murmurs back, as if that explains everything and not nothing at all. Her lips brush the gap between those soft silks and the column of an ivory throat. The temptation to leave a mark there is steadily increasing.

"Vintel." Her name sounds good in that voice, its hint of an accent of the older tongue yet prevalent, as if the letters wished to form themselves a different way. "Perhaps you can tell me what I am to do with all the quel'dorei the Prince keeps sending over my wall, then, Vintel."

_She'd like to hear it another way._

"I'm not a guardsman," she drawls out in a soft purr of amusement. The line of her teeth settles gently at the juncture of a slender shoulder and the other's neck, not pressing any further, never breaking the skin even if she wants to. She doesn't want to get slapped again. Well. Not entirely true. She does and she doesn't. She presses a light kiss there instead, drinks in the way an ear shifts at that before she whispers, "I'm the royal assassin."

And, _oh._

 _That laugh_ is genuine, it's silvery notes brighter in the early afternoon light. It's a laugh she can feel through those slim shoulders, see in the silver-blue of those eyes when the other abandons the vine and turns to find her once more, catches her jaw in slender fingertips in a way that she's already starting to like.

"Are you to nip me to death, then?" there's a soft melody of mirth to that cadence now, Morilinde's silvery eyes holding to her steel for a heartbeat, then two, three. "I doubt your liege lord would be appreciative."

_You don't know anything about my liege lord._

Anasterian would tell her to _get it._

\---

By the time the anonymous visitor Morilinde had been anticipating strolls out from beneath the sun-gold foliage and tangled branches of Cinderlight Spire, it is well into the afternoon. She should have had the good sense to collect her hat from the house sooner, if she intended to be out this long. There's already a dreadful hint of warmth along her cheekbones, at the tips of her ears, that tells her that she's seen too much sun already, and the comfortable shade that the brim offers as she adjusts it is too little, too late. 

"You shouldn't be out in the sun," that summer-warm voice, shimmering and golden, breaks her from her reverie and draws her attention up from the little box of ointment in her hand. The one that she's been putting off the application of, if only because it feels too much like admitting defeat at the moment. Dawn-grey eyes meet hers, a brow cocked as that lean frame draws nearer, all dappled in amber as the sunlight bleeds through the trees.

Morilinde wrinkles her nose faintly.

Something about the cocksure, knowing smile she receives for that, the prowl to the gait as that lean frame lopes up the stairs, reminds her of a lynx in the forest beyond. It's reinforced when her guardsman… _and when did she begin to consider her **her** guardsman, then?_ Still, her guardsman settles onto the stone step beside her, bearing with her the scent of balsam and leather, a hint of steel. 

It's all the more prominent as she places a light, chaste kiss to a sun-warmed cheek by way of greeting, a soft affection that imbues the gesture but never quite gives itself permission to enter her voice despite the words, "Perhaps I was becoming jealous, _anarore_. It seems to favour you by far."

She should have accomplished more in the garden today, the claret roses not weeded, the wildthistle unwatered and wilting subtly about the edges, but something about the line of those lean shoulders, the cocksure smile at the corner of those lips is already threatening to make her forget her intentions for the day. 

It should be a crime to look that good in hunting leathers, their russet and umber doeskin dappled in such a way as to meld into the forest beyond. It's not a look she's seen on the other thus far, does not emulate the colours of the city in wine-dark red and bronze in the way she's become accustomed to. It strikes her that her visitor may be off duty today, and that makes her uncertain in more ways than it does not.

Because it's been easy not to open herself to that idea, as it has been easy to remain apart from Silvermoon proper, to involve herself in her own work and nothing else for more than a hundred years thrice over. It makes her uncertain because it has been two visits since her guardsman last teased about the roses, and the asking has never seemed sincere, raising more questions than she has answer to. But the other's persistence, and that she has, and how she has, threatens to press along the seams of old injuries if it continues and the roses remain the goal.

It must show upon her countenance, and that won't stand to do at all, because a subtly calloused hand has lifted. A knuckle tucks beneath her chin to tilt it up, until her silvery eyes meet dawn-grey once more.

"Where did you just go then?" And that's too personal a question by far.

But she answers it, in as much as she doesn't, and the word that falls from her lips is, "Silvermoon."

A thumb brushes gently along the line of her jaw, and the hue of those dawn-grey eyes seems a touch richer now, heady as a stormfront rolling in over the city of Eternal Spring. _Anarore_ 's lip twitches at the corner, and it seems to her a further crime that that countenance is easily beautiful in the way that it is, all firm-boned beauty and mettle, like the golden blade of Belore herself.

Hunting leathers seem appropriate for the words that follow, soft as the pawpads of a lynx as it trails after its prey, a touch cautious but harbouring no less confidence for it as that summer-warm voice observes, "You don't trust me today."

"No," comes Morilinde's response, succinct in its own way but without so much as an ounce of malice. She isn't about to divulge more just yet, but then, nothing else is asked of her for the moment, and that in and of itself is a relief.

Instead, those strong, slender hands gently lift the tin of ointment from her own and twist off the lid to expose the balm within. She watches as those long fingers daub a bit of it into the palm of one hand, mold it between the subtly calloused pads of the fingertips to make it more malleable to work with. And then, with utmost care for the action, and perhaps not a lick of caution for her supposed lack of trust, the other begins a careful application of the balm to her countenance. 

The herbal fragrance of the ointment melds with something else this close, something beneath the scent of leathers, something that almost seems familiar and almost evades her. _Linseed oil_ , the memory of a memory that lingers on the periphery but whose meaning she cannot grasp with a thumb stroking up along the curve of her cheekbone so tenderly.

"Why not?" that timbre is almost soft, malleable and molten as Belore herself, shimmering through the red-gold trees to dapple the forest floor. Another slow stroke to the jaw, as if to ensure the balm has been imbued into her skin, and then those fingertips comb ivory tresses ever-so-carefully behind her ear, as if intent to finish the whole of it for her. 

Subtly calloused, that warm touch chases the hollow of her throat, traces the places that silk borders on milky skin, thorough in its attention, but never so forward that she objects. Even when those dawn-grey eyes, not quite the colour of the sky, not quite the colour of the sun, find hers so boldly and hold her gaze, asking questions that never make their way into words.

She should.

She can feel that in her bones. She should have protested far before now, with the sensation of those fingertips sliding up the side of her throat, not quite curling around it but neither far from it, instead lingering at the pulse-point. And then that gaze shifts down, barely visible behind dawn-gold lashes as a thumb brushes softly to that place. 

"Because, _anarore_ ," and _Belore_ , it's hard to remember why - to focus on anything else. Still, Morilinde's cadence is smooth as silk, cool in intonation despite the jolt that simmers beneath her skin when an exhalation finds its way just shy of that touch, and then gently, so gently it could almost be imagined, the warm curve of those lips brushes there thereafter. Lingering, as if savouring the way that the pulse jumps beneath them at the recognition. "I still don't know _why you're here_."

There has been no shortage of guardsmen from the capital these last months, but they sought roses only, and she knows _why_. The toil of magic and blood which took centuries for her to cultivate in the shadow of Cinderlight Spire. And for what? That Kael’thas may impress this petty lord or that, as if it could take anything less than _millenia_ for her to grant him forgiveness. But this one. _This one_. This one persists, and she finds herself not minding the persistence, this game that they have begun to play - neither knowing the outcome, the stakes, anything but the rules, unspoken but understood.

"If I wanted your roses, I would have taken them," and _her_ guardsman is bold, far bolder than she should be. Far bolder than she should allow, as her slender hand finds the other's chin, and that dawn-crowned head shifts instead to press a kiss to the palm of it. Then up, nose brushing her cheek, jaw still caged within her fingers, until the next breath comes there in a low whisper, "I would very much like to-”

Those gold-and-grey eyes meet hers once more, from so much closer still, and they're beautiful: _sunrise through the rain._

She shouldn't be doing this, but she's never been anything if not moth to the flame. So her thumb slips up, chases the curve of a lower lip, and then the upper. When it curls for her it's with the damp heat of an exhalation, the sharp pressure of an incisor pressed to the pad of it. Dawn-grey eyes are intense on her own, and she understands the sentiment in them better than most. 

And this time the words cut off sharply, because she has pressed up, until that fang almost, but never quite, breaks the skin. It isn't lost on her, the way the pupils flare subtly at that, or the soft rumble that comes from the other's chest, reverberating where they touch. Anarore isn't used to not being in control, not used to being pressed on anything, if she were betting from that look.

Morilinde finds it a curious trait for a guardsman.

This time, her eyes are a sliver of silver behind a veil of snowy lashes, and what she leans forward to confide, only a scarce distance from those teeth and with all the weight of a command, is, "Do it properly, then."

This time, it's dawn-grey eyes that flash dangerously, and that lean frame moves in a fluid, smooth way she has only seen in wild things. All power and prowl, as a lean arm curves around her and lifts her with minimal effort into the other woman's lap. It leaves her looking down instead of up, the ivory of her hair falling around the other's firm-boned countenance, and she has the wherewithal to realize that there is a hand winding into the tresses at her nape, even as hers catches at the collar of those hunting leathers.

It's softer than she anticipated, the first brush of those lips to her own. Warmer still, subtly chapped from the wind in a way that she likes. At a soft exhalation - hers - and then it deepens of a sudden, and she likes that _more_ , the tempo kept slow and exploratory and _thorough_. As if the first rain of the season, warm and welcome with the summer, pouring through the amber leaves as thunder echoes, rolling on a distant horizon. 

Subtly calloused fingertips curl at the nape of her neck when she catches a lower lip ever-so-gently between her own, only releasing it to kiss teasingly at the curve of the upper, and she can taste the subtle, floral note of honeysuckle well before the reciprocation, well before the arm at her back shifts her closer and the other woman brushes the bridge of her nose gently to hers and then kisses her all the more _deeply_. 

It simmers beneath her skin, settles molten in her veins, and it's easy to lose herself in the way that it feels as the hand in her hair draws forward to direct the angle of them, the way that hard-angled jaw feels, sharp enough to cut beneath her thumbs as she strokes up it. The soft hint of a _wanting sound_ into her mouth, when she reaches the apex and then strokes up toward the ears. That, she feels too. In the chest where it's pressed to hers, low and reverberating through flesh and bone, through leather and silk to find her. 

And what to do with that? She has several ideas. But perhaps, Morilinde muses at the sudden clatter in the vicinity of the kitchen, she shall never find out. Perhaps this ends here, as it began, with her silver eyes locked with dawn-grey, and her breathing more shallow than it was this close, just shy of joining their lips again. She can feel the warm exhalations of that lean frame against the corner of her mouth, draws the fragrance of the forest that clings to the other on every breath, not wanting to give it up at the moment; its balsam pine and well-kept leather, the heady undercurrent of campfire smoke. 

"You _really_ don't need to stop," comes a velvety voice from further up the stairs, Vintel's steps silent as she descends them one at a time, a tray of tea precariously balanced in one hand. Steel-blue eyes slip from one of them to the other in swift succession, vastly amused, before the other elf drawls, "But if you're going to start again, you could at least wait for me. I won't bite. _Again_. I promise."

That devilish smile speaks volumes otherwise.

\---

Her hair feels like _silk_ between Sylvanas's fingers.

Cool to the touch and impossibly soft, harbouring the scent of rosewater and vanilla, of dark earth and verdant things that bloom by the moonlight alone. She wants to tangle them further, to draw the curve of those pale lips back down to hers. Silvery eyes tell her as much as anything that they want the same. 

But her ear shifts back at the sound of porcelain being set upon the stones nearby, and the subtle warmth at her back tells her soon enough that Vintel is settling behind her, those long arms draping around her shoulders and a feather-light kiss finding the line of her jaw. _Wicked thing_. It doesn't help at all, that Morilinde's touch traces up her ear toward the tip, then strokes back down in a thorough fashion, altogether too practiced, as if knowing exactly what sensation it elicits in her. 

_She can't not._

She runs her tongue slowly over teeth, testing the edge, tasting a hint of vanilla and rosewater still. Watches how silvery eyes follow that motion, and feels a spark of desire for it. It's hard not to. That gaze tells her everything that she wants to know, expressive in a way that the cool facade of that countenance never is. It shows her the moment of _wanting_ , and the hesitance, a guarded instant in which the other reminds her of a dragonhawk, beautiful, capricious, never knowing whether it will turn its head or strike.

Strike, apparently, though not in a way that she'd protest. With a soft kiss that lingers, first to the corner of her mouth, then the other, in a way that teases her dreadfully for as long as it can, brushes to the bow of her upper lip and then the lower, threatens to sink back until her fingers tighten in the silk of that hair and jerk forward. And then Morilinde is tracing the line of her teeth instead, and she realizes that was the intent all along, cannot quite contain the chuckle that sounds in her chest for it. 

_This fucking girl._

Shut-ins don't kiss like this. No one she knows kisses like this, as if they had all the time in the world to draw it out, hidden in the shade of the garden. As if to search out everything that she likes best and _exploit it_. To make her feel out of control, while being so thoroughly in it. Morilinde inhales sharply when she draws an incisor just so to the curve of a lower lip, ever-so-gentle, then nips freshly at the upper.

Or perhaps that sound is for _Vintel,_ who has leaned over her shoulder and left a mark, already bruising with subtle hues of cobalt and amaranthine beneath the milky complexion of the other elf's skin, stark at the column of a throat. One that the gardener has lifted fingertips to with a look of incredulity, and Sylvanas only _just_ sees the glint in those eyes before Morilinde has reached over her shoulder to grasp the scoundrel by the ear, albeit lightly, but in a way that has a hint of colour to Vintel's cheekbones, that makes those teeth click together gently near her ear as a mouth shuts.

" _You_ ," Morilinde enunciates every syllable of her words in that smooth cadence, a hint of Old Thalassian bleeding in as she sweeps her hair forward, over the shoulder to cover the blossoming bite and leave the other side of the throat bare, " _Again?_ Behave."

Sylvanas wants to leave her own mark there _terribly_ , a smile toying at the corner of her lips as she only just brushes a kiss there and slender fingers catch her by the jaw. She retaliates with a streak of mischief, blows a puff of air over the damp skin she's left behind, watching it prickle with gooseflesh with immediacy. Dawn-grey eyes unapologetic when they find the other's silver, the corner of her lips curls into a smirk.

"You're both _dreadful_ ," Morilinde confides to her in a smooth cadence, a current of amusement evident beneath its silk, if only just. She could almost call the way her cheek is gently shoved away playful, and watches with satisfaction as those slender fingers slip from her, touch the side of a throat briefly instead. "And overly familiar. You both serve together on the guard, I take it?"

She doesn’t need to look to know that the gardener still has hold of Vintel’s ear. She can feel the way the heartbeat pressed against the back of her shoulder jumps, how the knees tighten at her sides when a pale finger strokes up the ear toward the apex. Leaning back subtly into the warmth of the rogue’s body, hears a little sound emit from the other at that, the fluttering quickening of a pulse as it races like a rabbit through the brush.

 _Maybe she is dreadful, but she's enjoying herself **immensely**_.

"After a manner of speaking," Sylvanas settles on after a moment's thought, her timbre pleasant and more than a little buoyant. Hand lifting, she tucks the knuckle of her forefinger beneath the rogue's chin, strokes the line of the jaw with the pad of her thumb, observing with a chuckle all the while, "I can't believe you let _Vintel_ into the spire. Should I be jealous?"

" _Vintel_ has a name, _anarore_ ," Morilinde answers easily, silvery eyes cool in their regard of her, though they shift to follow the touch she offers the other. She could swear that the corner of those lips curls ever-so-faintly, and they return, shimmering and dead-set to her own as the slip of a thing confides softly, almost teasingly, "But you may be jealous, if you like."

" _ **Vintel**_ ," a voice drawls, velvety, almost husky from over her shoulder. She can feel the puff of air that escapes the elf behind her, breathed out against her cheek as Cinderlight does _something_ to the poor thing that she can't quite see. She can hear it in spades when that cadence shudders in a pleasant way, " _Desperately_ needs you to let go of her ear or take her to bed."

Smooth as the silks that are brushing against her bare forearms now, threaten to make gooseflesh prickle along the sun-gold skin, Morilinde shifts forward to place a soft kiss to the corner of Vintel's mouth, confides there simply, "Sorry, kitten."

She isn't. _At all_. That much is evident on that elegant countenance when silvery eyes meet hers once more.

"Kitten?" Sylvanas presses with a sound of amusement, her ear twitching as Vintel opts to nuzzle in close, honey-blonde hair tickling the side of her neck.

"Where did you find this _fine_ specimen of a guardsman, Cinderlight?" Vintel teases there in a drawl, and she doesn't need to look to know those ears have shifted subtly, that steel-blue eyes are watching Morilinde from over her shoulder almost akin to the new namesake. That there's a cheeky smile against her ear, "You are pretty fine, you know. For a _guardsman_. What did you even do to get a pretty girl to sweet-talk you in _Old Thalassian?_ "

“Behave,” Morilinde intones coolly, the word less an explanation and more an encouragement. One of those slender hands comes to rest along her upper arm then, holds there for balance as the gardener leans over to select a cup of tea. Once righted, the touch remains, a thumb stroking over the contour of muscle there as the paler elf blows upon the brew to cool it. 

"Oh, I doubt that," Vintel answers no less cheekily, and it's oddly comfortable, this. The rogue draped around her shoulders, grinning from ear-to-ear as they banter. The girl in her lap that doesn't even know her name, half-leaned against her nonetheless and pausing in the midst of lifting a teacup.

"Manual labor," Sylvanas clarifies dryly, though the corner of her lip curls up a scarce measure. "You won't get the _Old Thalassian_ treatment until you've spent three hours cursing a storm over a half-buried tree and gotten your shirt caught up in the roses at least twice."

Then, with a flick of her ears up a measure, she asks of the paler of the two, "Speaking of. What have you on the list today? Threshing down the wildthistle? Shall I move a large stone from one side of the garden to the other, so you can decide you'd care to see it elsewhere anyways?"

Morilinde's gaze is cool and thoughtful, silvery as a rush of water as it comes to rest to her own. Never quite taking a sip of tea, the other elf instead lifts a slender hand to carefully, gently brush an eyelash from the arc of the ranger's cheekbone before confirming, "The last has some merit, I should think."

Her arm around the other pulls a little nearer, and she doesn't miss the little smile of amusement that curls the corner of those lips, hidden away before it can linger long, but earning her a sense of satisfaction.

"Why?" Sylvanas presses.

A little shrug accompanies Morilinde's response, a candid admission of, "I'd like to watch you do it."

There's a tug to her shirt-sleeve, an impish grin against the side of her neck as Vintel teases, voice all honey and sunlight, "I can lift rocks." And then those golden lashes only just shrouding steel-blue eyes, "I'll take my shirt off right now."

"That's not even _your_ shirt," Sylvanas accuses back with a wry chuckle, head atilt to look at the rogue sidelong.

"You could take yours off, too," comes the response, and that devilish smile curls all the wider at its corners. A faux innocence crosses Vintel's countenance as the other elf drawls out, "And you, petal. I'll even volunteer to help you with the sunbalm. Get your shoulders? Help with the-"

"Vintel," the retort is succinct, as cool as ever, and it seems unfair that Morilinde should have the other elf figured out so quickly. Should be able to direct such sentiment with something so simple as a look of silvery eyes, stark behind snowy lashes now. 

"Cinderlight, _darling_ ," Vintel is an imp, rises to the occasion at every conceivable opportunity, and takes this one with little hesitation. Nestling in to all but mould to her back, the cheeky thing reaches over her shoulder to touch a fingertip to the end of the gardener's nose, drawls out teasingly as if intent to tempt fate when it wrinkles faintly, as if the same thought had only just occurred to her, "How are you so _pale_? Does Belore _hate you?_ "

It's true, but the sour look that Morilinde levels at the rogue behind her makes her chuckle. Vintel looks positively bronzed against that milk-white complexion, which seems so anomalous for a highborne. 

"Our kal'dorei ancestry is..." there's a pause in the answer, Morilinde's silver eyes blinking once after a sip of tea has been taken, and then that reserved countenance goes _incredulous_. She could swear it takes the other effort to swallow, before the teacup is set gently to the side. "More recent than in some lines. It likes to make a scene every few generations. _Where_ did you get this?"

That expression is almost endearing, but not as emotive as the cat-and-the-canary grin that Vintel flashes at the question, those steel-blue eyes devilish as the cheeky thing drawls out, "But you're _so small_."

Sylvanas cannot suppress a laugh, hears it summer-warm and pleasant in spite of her as her shoulders shake in the afternoon light. It's true. Cinderlight is a head shorter than either of them, only just reaches the hollow of her throat when standing, and right now, those silvery eyes are imperious as they peer at the elf behind her, as if _daring_ Vintel to say something else about it. 

She could swear she hears the near-breathless whisper of _pocket kal'dorei_ near her ear, and only just manages to avoid the twitch it wants to make at that, schooling her countenance evenly as she asks in a summer-warm timbre, "What did she bring you?"

The Ranger-General's curiosity is what ends up being her downfall, and when she cannot place the tea by scent or appearance, it gets the better of her. She shouldn't, but does slip her bow-calloused fingers around the still-warm teacup and lift it to her lips to take a hesitant sip, which she _immediately_ regrets. **Belore**.

Tea is a _very loose_ descriptor, and beneath the murky surface of the scarlet brew, an entire chunk of preserved honeycomb is bleeding black sugar into the bottom of the cup like sludge, cloyingly sweet and still somehow entirely insufficient to cut the _acrid_ taste of bloodthistle, of dreamfoil, of mageroyal. The entirety of the concoction simmers with the arcane, potent and seductive, and she doesn't hesitate to lean to the side, spitting it out into the vine below and watching it _all but unfurl_ on the spot.

Wiping her chin with the back of a sun-gold hand and still tasting the grit of black honey, partially crystallized, on her teeth, Sylvanas uses an easy strength to lift the occupant of her lap with the other arm and set Morilinde back down onto the stones with care not to dirty the silks, though she misses the comfortable weight, the softness against her skin in the other's absence. It does make it much easier to descend the steps, root about in the basket left at their base, twist off the wax seal.

She doesn't need to look to know that Vintel is _actively sulking_ at her departure, but she needs the taste of bloodthistle out of her mouth _yesterday_. Bending, she draws a slim-handled knife of antler and gilded metal from the top of her boot and uses it to uncork the bottle in a motion that, perhaps, belies too much practice, and taking a deep pull from it before trotting back up the steps.

Slender arms draped around Morilinde and honey-blonde head nestled to the side of the other's neck, Vintel is - in fact - actively sulking about her departure, an exaggerated pout on the rogue's slender countenance, though the steel-blue of those eyes harbours nothing but mischief. It's all terribly dramatic. 

" _Belore_ , that was _awful_ ," Sylvanas announces, countenance twisting just so at even the memory of the flavour, the way the arcane and all those bloody herbs had simmered, smouldered on her tongue. Wrinkling her nose, she lifts the bottle to take another swallow of wine, tasting in its stead a hint of dried fruit, of chocolate, of perhaps a hint of oak in a way that's _fathoms_ more pleasant. "How did you even stomach that?"

Morilinde merely strokes the line of Vintel's jaw with a fingertip, as if stroking a particularly wicked but endearing cat, and muses in a smooth cadence, "Bloodthistle is an acquired taste. I don't, frequently." And then silvery gaze flicking sidelong as the rogue's countenances nuzzles into her neck, cadence as soft and sincere as the touch ghosted along the other's cheek, "I swear by the Sunwell, Vintel, if you bite me a third time I will backhand you to Dalaran."

"Promise?" and of course Vintel would purr that in response, head tipping up nonetheless to steal a kiss from the other's lips instead. An instant passes in which she's certain the cheeky thing is about to nip Morilinde's lower lip, but the opportunity slips by without incident as it's asked instead, "What's bloodthistle for, petal?"

Silvery eyes cast over the other elf's countenance as if in contemplation of it, or perhaps some unseen prospect, then back up to hers with the same cool regard, asking a question without words and receiving an answer in the tilt of her head, the cant of her ears, the bow-calloused hand that she holds out toward the other in offering.

"Come out to the garden, and I'll show you," comes the counter-offer from Morilinde, unexpected, and silvery eyes meet Vintel's for an instant before clarifying, "Leave the tea. It will be much better with a fresh bloom."

When a pale hand slips into hers, it feels soft to the touch, lacks the roughness she would anticipate of one who spent so many hours toiling over flower and vine, and she assists the gardener up to her feet before offering the other to Vintel to take. Bloodthistle isn't a fancy she's about to partake in personally, but she has no qualms otherwise. It is perhaps Quel'Thalas's least well-kept secret that the Convocation is rife with its use, anyways, if the accounts of some of Tyraenniel's parties are to be believed.

When Vintel takes her hand, she pulls the other up a touch quicker, off-balance so that the rogue's frame falls into hers - and offers a cocksure smile for it that's all too easily returned. It's about to be an afternoon, if either of them have anything to say about it.

\---

Some days, everything really does come up Vintel.

Today, she thinks, as she stretches languidly and settles back in, is definitely one of them.

 _Come down to the garden with me_ , had turned out to mean nestled in a positively opulent set of cushions down by the pond, just shy of being able to touch the water. Close enough that the flash of silvery fins and hints of rainbow-brilliant gold beneath the surface are mesmerizing to watch. The soft sound of insects and birdsong hums in the air, and from time to time, a chorus of small frogs picks up on the far side of the pond. It's shrouded beneath the suntrees enough that shade dapples over them, which is good for her company, and it's cooler now that the sun has dipped lower on the horizon. 

But warm enough, because it would almost be impossible not to be like this. With Sylvanas leaned back in the cushions, half-seated against the bark-limned trunk of a suntree, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with the world's palest gardener, and her all but draped between them. One of the Ranger-General's arms rests comfortably around her waist, and her cheek is resting on the soft, soft, impossibly soft silk between her and Morilinde's chest at the moment.

She has already been chided, albeit gently, for telling aforementioned elf that her tits were the nicest pillow in all of Quel'Thalas, but it wasn't a scolding she could take very seriously. After all, she's not _wrong_.

But she does, in fact, has the power of conviction on her side. Conviction, and the way that her bones feel like amber in the best possible way, warm and full of sunlight. As if they had soaked up all the languid gold of the lazy mid-afternoon for her alone, and whispered sweet nothings to her until her skin hummed with magic. Which may have more than a little to do with the fresh bloodthistle bloom she had held between her tongue and the roof of her mouth until it's potency was spent, but still. 

This is nice.

And everything just feels… _more_.

The faintest hint of a breeze that caresses her sun-gilded skin, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. A soft touch as it trails slowly up the back of her neck, circling the base of her ear and then tracing up it, only to glide back down. The thrum of a heartbeat under her cheek, and the way a bow-calloused hand is stroking an idle design over the plane of her hip in a slow, methodical fashion that makes the sensation travel down quite a bit further. 

"You smell good," Vintel sighs into the silk, nosing in a little further and exhaling contentedly. It's complementary, the rosewater and vanilla of the one, a hint of something else lingering beneath it. The leather and balsam of the other.

Warmth blossoms at the back of her neck when Sylvanas kisses it, and the murmur of a chuckle runs through a warm timbre as the ranger confides, "She's a mage. They all smell good."

"Not this good," Vintel answers back as if it were simply fact, shifting her shoulders as she settles in further, and is rewarded with another, softer kiss for the effort, this one to her temple in a way that blossoms down her throat. _Morilinde_ , whose touch traces up the back of her neck in tandem with the soft show of affection. 

Morilinde, whose silvery eyes lift toward the ranger to inquire lightly, "Do we, now? And how, pray tell, did you come to that conclusion?"

For as delicately as those words are spoken, they are all spring-coiled trap well-hidden in the grass, the jaws of them gleaming and silver, ready to draw blood upon the misstep. 

But then there's a shiver in the slim frame beneath hers, and she watches with a vague fascination as gooseflesh stipples the milky skin of a collarbone in time with a low, pleased sound above her, and realize that must be Sylvanas leaving a mark on the pale column of a neck.

"I suspect the same way you did, _little Miss Bloodthistle_ ," Sylvanas's voice has gone a touch lower, thrilling in a richness and more than a little lynx-in-the-grass. The bow-calloused fingertips upon the plane of her hip dig in a little, and it's her turn to shiver. "Or are we playing at innocent now?" And then to her, thumbing up the hem of the silk a scarce measure, "Is this Kael's shirt?"

"You scarcely know enough of me to make that accusation," comes Morilinde's retort, cool and smooth as the silks beneath Vintel's cheek. But she doesn't miss the way those snowy lashes flutter at the mention of the prince, or the way that silver eyes harden, the way the form under hers stiffens subtly. "I see."

Vintel blinks slowly, her steel-blue eyes keen as they sweep over the paler elf's countenance, and without so much as a second thought about the matter, she sits up, and summarily strips the cobalt blue silk over her head, tossing it into the nearby rosebushes without so much as a care. It leaves her bare to the waist save for a chest-binding, bronzed skin shimmering beneath warm dapples of amber sunlight like the coat of a leopard.

Stretching slowly, languidly, in the aftermath of the action, the toned musculature in her back shifting in the light, Vintel combs her honey-blonde hair back behind her ears with her fingertips, then nestles back between the other two. At the incredulous look from Morilinde, she scrunches her nose playfully and teases, "I like you better. Don't sulk, petal."

"I am _not_ su-"

And it strikes her, lightning-quick and just as hot beneath her skin, that the arm around her hips has tightened subtly, that she can feel the exhalation of a breath in the instant before a mouth maps the space between her shoulder and neck. Sylvanas _fucking_ Windrunner with the winning strategy, one that makes her ears lift and a hint of colour burn along her cheekbones when she feels a teeth scrape gently there.

This is the best spot in the whole damned garden.

"You are," Vintel drawls out knowingly nonetheless, honey-blonde lashes fluttering for an instant before her steel-blue eyes lift to find Morilinde's. A look of mischief about her, she catches the gardener's chin in her fingertips, a light, surprisingly chaste kiss placed at the corner of the paler elf's lips before she pulls Morilinde forward a scarce measure and makes a low sound in her throat to catch Sylvanas's attention, "When you _could_ be feeding me moonberries and enjoying yourself. Life is for living."

And then, for good measure, "Fuck Kael'thas."

She feels more than a bit of satisfaction at the chuckle from Sylvanas at that, resonating behind her, and the taller elf murmurs, "Or don't. Definitely don't," against the line of her throat before doing exactly what she hoped, namely leaning over her shoulder to mirror her earlier action. She likes to watch. To see how snowdrop-white lashes flutter against pale cheekbones when the Ranger-General herself places a kiss to the opposite corner of Morilinde's lips.

That's better.

And this is _definitely_ where she wants to be, _especially_ with the elegant column of that neck exposed the way it is, the mark she left upon it earlier already bruising a distinct shade of plum. She revisits it with pleasure, drunk on bloodthistle and wine, on the way that the place between silk-soft tresses and a slender shoulder smells enticingly of vanilla and rosewater, how it tastes faintly of salt when her lips find it. It isn't long before she's left another welt on milky skin, and, ever-unrepentant, nipped sharply there afterwards just for the sake of it.

A soft, displeased sound emanates from that slip of a thing, and pale fingers catch her without fail, firmly by the ear. Pull her head back to reveal the full extent of the wicked grin that stretches across her features nearly from one ear to the other. It doesn't hurt. No, but it only just threatens to. But there's something in the imperious glint in those silvery eyes, in the way that grasp tightens _just so_ in a way that she likes, as if knowing she likes it, that sets a spark of heat through her.

That makes her wonder what it would be like to know this girl the way that Eredenia knew this girl, what it was that made her worth remembering, all those dried flowers pressed between the pages of a book in the Magistrix's tower. That makes her wonder if she's about to get what she wants, or be thrown from the garden in a fit of pique. 

"Turnabout is fair play, kitten," is what falls from those lips, before they find the place just below her ear - and it's warm and good in every way she imagined it might be. Even when the teeth press into her sun-gold skin. Even when Morilinde draws back, only just enough to look over her shoulder, and requests as smooth as silk, "Be a darling and hold this for me, would you?"

She doesn't need to see the cocksure smile that crosses Sylvanas's countenance, but catches a hint of it in the reflection of silver eyes, the subtle lift of a brow. She doesn't need to see it, because she can feel the way that bow-calloused fingertips are winding into her hair at the nape, even as Morilinde releases her ear, and then the curve of the ranger's lips has found the place beneath it, opposite the mark blooming under her sun-bronzed complexion, intent on coaxing forth another.

Silken tresses tickle her collarbone as a pale head dips, another left near the hollow of her throat with slow precision, as if they both were relishing this every bit as much as she was. And honestly, if _this_ is how the other two are going to take out their simmering sexual tension, with a cool hand running along her rib-cage, and a warmer one trailing idly along her hip-bone while Sylvanas lavishes the place between her neck and shoulder with affection, then she's _all_ up for it. 

It's hours yet before she'll have to return to Silvermoon.

\---

Sylvanas Windrunner is _bored as sin_.

Bored as sin, and would no doubt be sweating through six layers of useless ceremonial armor in the middle of this thrice-damned heatwave had Anasterian not insisted that it was too _warm_ for her or her rangers to strut around in their formal attire solely for Kael’thas’s entertainment. Her liege lord is, after all, the very sort to over-indulge his son, but not the sort to risk another unlucky ranger-cadet clanging into the polished marble floor from ignorance-induced heatstroke.

The Convocation is in _fits_ about the sweltering weather, fussing over the crystals and the well, and working themselves into a positive lather about it, which she’s almost grateful for as another bead of sweat trickles down her spine. Midsummer in Quel’Thalas is brutal without the elemental controls, more so to those unused to being outside the Eversong proper.

Such is the case with the latest little lordling from Dalaran that Kael’thas has been preening for. He’s dragged the poor lad across the grounds at least four times already, and always with a ranger escort in tow, and if the blotchy redness of the boy’s countenance or the way he keeps dabbing at his face and neck with a kerchief is any indication, whatever the velvet… _ensemble_ that he’s wearing is, isn’t doing him any large favours right now.

Kael’thas is just...well. Kael’thas. Daubing primly at his temples in gauzy robes and occasionally glancing across the throneroom to see what they’re up to. He’s still wearing his pauldrons. _Morilinde is right_ , she muses as she tosses another brace of cards atop the pile and raps a knuckle near it on the table to indicate she’d like another. _His pauldrons are beyond ridiculous._

_This bloody heat._

Sylvanas takes her dealt card when offered, a sheen of sweat sticking the wine-red silk of her shirt to the back of her shoulders as she leans forward. It dampens the embroidery, leaf-and-vine picked out in gold and melding into a dull bronze. Sylvos would have a fit if he could see it. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Across the table from the High King and adjacent to her second-in-command, she has spent the better part of the half-hour keenly monitoring the every move of the former, convinced beyond any reasonable doubt and by the brazen winning of every hand, that he’s been cheating left and right.

Anasterian always cheats at cards. That isn’t the bit that’s bothering her. It’s more so that she has _et to figure out how._

It doesn’t do that even the intrepid _Ranger-General_ herself cannot see any cards hidden away up his sleeves or perhaps even tucked into the silken sash across his chest. The only thing her dawn-grey eyes have observed for all their intent hawkishness is his frequent reaching for a frosted goblet of icewine, not an altogether uncommon occurrence on its own. That and his cocky shit grin, which could quite possibly threaten to rival Theron’s right now. If Theron, seated at her right and bluffing every goddamn hand because he knows he can’t win, could look any cockier about _losing_.

She’s tempted to kick him under the table.

This is somehow even worse than the time they played with Velonara.

She’s also pretending that she cannot see Theron watching her own observation of a handful of ranger-cadets across the room, ear twitch when his scrutiny doesn’t alleviate. It doesn’t matter, really. There are a hundred and one excuses that she could use if called on it, and none of them need to include her idle curiosity about the Cinderlight family. 

For instance, that Noas doesn’t look a damned thing like his only sibling. A head and a half taller and broad at the shoulders, his hair is dark and his eyes like slate. Not even half as pale, with a tan to his complexion already from his time in the wood. And she’s seen more expression flit across his face already than she’s seen on Morilinde’s in nigh over a month.

Not that she doesn’t already plan to change that. Just that it’s a longer and far more satisfying game already than it’s proven to be in the past.

"Flush,” the High King interrupts her introspection with another flawless hand.

_Surprise, surprise._

“I want to play for something more substantial,” Sylvanas confides suddenly, leaning forward to toss another few silver atop her liege lord’s growing pile of winnings and seeing him look, if possible, all the more delighted when she takes the opportunity to pointedly check the inside of his shirt-sleeve for cards. 

“I’m out if we’re playing for actual stakes,” Theron concedes at the mere mention, or maybe because she’s nudged his ankle under the table, his last few silver tossed atop the pile as well before he moves to stand. He does pause to advise, as he secures a cloak around his shoulders, “Don’t let him take the shirt off your back, Windrunner. I don’t know that the cadets could take it.”

They probably couldn’t, if she’s being honest. Half of the new ones still go moon-eyed every time they see her in remote proximity, which isn’t exactly conducive to them taking orders, and is entirely the reason she never takes on cadets directly. Well. With the obvious exception of Marris, but that had come with the added perk of annoying _everyone in this room_ beyond measure.

“What will we be playing for then, Miss Windrunner?” Anasterian’s kindly, weathered voice is undercut by his cunning smile, sky-blue eyes sparkling with what she would absolutely call _old bastard_ as he expertly shuffles the deck once more and starts to cut it upon the table.

“Holiday,” Sylvanas returns in an idle fashion, settling back comfortably in her chair as she takes her cards from him. “A fortnight and a half. Theron can handle the Farstriders. Velonara can be his second. No foreign dignitaries until I return.”

“Only a fortnight. _Brightwing_ , I should think, as his second,” comes his response as he scrutinizes his own hand. “And if I take the round, you provide an honor guard to Kael for this...celebration he’s on about in a few weeks.”

“As if you weren’t going to make me do that anyway,” Sylvanas retorts with a soft snort, “And I know you’re cheating, you old dog. I just haven’t figured out where you’re hiding the cards.”

Much to what she can only presume is Kael’s horror at the haughty little sound he makes from across the room, she ducks to the side to peer under the table, ensuring that the crafty old bastard hasn’t stuck any cards to the underside of it.

“Unfounded suspicious from my own Ranger-General, for shame,” Anasterian replies with a sound of mirth. “Lireesa would never.”

“My mother,” Sylvanas answers back, tossing half her hand immediately into the discard pile. “Would never have been foolish enough to play cards with you in the first place, you scoundrel. Fleecing your own militia for their salary.”

When he smiles, his eyes crinkle with it, and his timbre is fond as he observes, “I should have you arrest yourself for slander, Sylvanas. Perhaps a month or so in the stockades.”

“The charges wouldn’t stick,” she muses as she collects her new hand, brows knitting subtly. “Everyone knows you’re a f-”

" _Father_ , Ranger-General Windrunner. _Please_ ," neither of them look up at the sound of Kael's voice from a table across the way. "If you could maintain some modicum of decorum whilst we have visitors."

The nice thing about having her back to the Crown Prince is that he can’t see her rolling her eyes at him. He can definitely see his father mouth out, “For shame, Ranger-General,” but doesn’t opt to take either of them up on that particular battle.

It dissipates from her mind soon after anyway, because there’s something _off_ about the room now that she cannot place. The faintest hint of a warm breeze ghosts over her skin near the nape of her neck, makes her ear twitch, then the other when there’s the faintest brush of butter-soft silk against her shoulder. The fragrance that clings to it is familiar. One that shouldn’t be here, not _here_ , of all places. Something like rosewater and vanilla, of garden-green and a hint of earth. Subdued. Fainter. Something like…

Keen eyes dead ahead as not to betray herself, she gives Anasterian a thoughtful look, and then reaches out with all the swiftness of a striking hawkstrider, catching a slender wrist within her bow-calloused hand and yanking down. The wrist brings the whole of the _elven rogue_ who’s been _spying on her hand_ down into her lap, the illusory shadow dissipating from that lithe form with the action.

“Uh oh,” Vintel drawls out, not at all put out by Anasterian’s sudden and dramatic sigh at her appearance, her hands lifting up in a little shrug. The rogue’s smile is beyond wicked, as if the prospect of having been found out were utterly delightful. “Looks like you caught me, Ranger-General. Now what are you going to do with me?”

Much to Anasterian’s apparent surprise and the rogue’s genuine delight, Sylvanas merely slips an arm around the woman in her lap, resting her chin on the other’s shoulder as she ponders her cards a second longer. _She has nothing._

“You look like a leopard,” is all Sylvanas observes in an idle timbre. “And I haven’t decided yet. Punish you, probably.”

Both of those are true. She tugs the side of that silky shirt in emphasis. _And this shirt_ , she realizes sooner than she doesn’t, isn’t so much a shirt as it is some form of camisole probably best not worn on its own, not that she thinks that the information would change Vintel’s mind on the matter. The hand-painted blooms on the fabric, the way it still bears the faintest hint of rose and vanilla, leaves her with little doubt as to _whom_ it actually belongs.

She dimly wonders when Vintel even had the time to steal it. It’s certainly not covering up the score of love bites on the column of that honey-gilded throat, or the more implicating ones near the sternum that she has a fair vantage of from her limited view down the front of it.

“Promise, _ann’da_?” falls lightly and without even an ounce of shame from those lips, the lower caught between Vintel’s teeth with the question in a way she doesn’t really have words for, so much as a desire to replace them with her own.

“Depends on whether or not I get this holiday,” Sylvanas answers matter-of-factly, attempting not to reveal that the coy look in steel-blue eyes or the way that honeyed lashes bat at her may be distracting in any fashion. She adds for good measure, “You might like it.”

“I see my traitorous Ranger-General and Silvermoon’s _worst spy_ are acquainted, then,” Anasterian observes from across the table, amusement alight in his sky-blue eyes as he looks at them. “I’d have invited you both to our Midwinter feast if I’d known.”

“I’m an excellent _assassin_ , though,” Vintel purrs back without so much as hesitation, settling back comfortably against her. A slender hand lifts, resting back over her shoulder to slide up into her hair and toy with it idly. “For example, I could snap her neck like a twig. But then you’d have to put up with Theron, and he’s not as nice to look at.”

“Theron actually won Silvermoon’s prettiest ranger,” Sylvanas announces, her eyes falling half-lid for a moment as nails draw lightly over the nape of her neck. She likes that. It doesn’t cause her to miss the muttered _damn straight_ from her second-in-command across the way. “We held a vote.”

The pleasant sensation of fingertips against her skin is distracting, but not distracting enough for her to miss the subtle shift of cards against her bow-calloused palm, the deft removal of three, their replacement with a hand far more suited to actually _winning for once_. She’s not sure where they came from - as it doesn’t look like there’s anywhere _to_ hide them in that shirt, but neither is she complaining.

“And you, Miss Windrunner?” Anasterian asks as he turns his cards over with flourish - and a bit of magic - not even touching them as they abruptly go face-up. Consternation touches his features not a second after, however, for whatever he sees in those crisp, gold-limned cards is not the hand that he anticipated. “What did you win?”

Sylvanas is about to protest when Vintel’s arm snakes from around her neck, the rogue taking her cards to lay them down one at a time on the table, revealing a perfect arrangement of royalty on scripted parchment. _A winning hand._

As pleased as a cat with cream, Vintel observes in a self-satisfied drawl, “Most improved. Now about that holiday?”


	3. the questions before have no place in this haunted house

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rawrkie chained me to my desk and made me write this

Jaina Proudmoore has had it absolute to _here_ with princes.

If she's being particular about it, which she absolutely is at this juncture of her day, she has had it positively to the peak of Mount Neverest with the Crown Princes of both Silvermoon and Lordaeron, respectively, who have taken it upon themselves of late to interrupt her studies at _every. possible. opportunity._

And to what purpose - she cannot fathom - save out of a childish need to...seemingly out-prince one another?

Would that her mind didn't feel like it may melt as the ice on the Kul Tiran docks come spring thaw, she may search for more apt descriptors of their rivalry, but in this instance, she finds herself content to settle for the one chose. At least until she recovers from their badgering further. Which should hopefully be soon, if she maintains her current location for at least an hour or two.

Because currently, nestled in the crook of an overstuffed armchair in this all-too-small Dalaran dormitory room with an archaic, yellow-paged tome in her lap and a lanky seal-point cat draped around her shoulders, purring to high heavens? This home away from home is starting to feel like a little slice of paradise, and she doesn't want to leave.

It's quiet, for one, which is also it's major selling point. Quiet, comfortable, and imbued with the subtle fragrance of vanilla, cinnamon, and cedar that seems to imbue everything Lirath Windrunner touches. The elf in question seems content to sprawl, lankier even than his cat, comfortably in the sunlight on the nearby bunk, worrying the pages of another tome between his delicate fingers and occasionally flicking an ear toward the door or window as if parsing sounds she cannot even begin to fathom.

Jaina thumbs through the brittle, flaking pages of her own book with a contented sound, merely the latest of _many_ since she arrived here. The tea he made is sweet and herbal, nothing she's had before, sweetened with some manner of dark honey and served with a hint of cream, and she has no sooner perched the cup upon the arm of the chair than a soft mewl emits from the throat of her feline compatriot, whose velvety paw daubs at the surface of it.

It's a transgression she permits out of amusement, by far the smallest she's suffered today, and rather than scold him, she opts to observe with a quiet sound of mirth as he primly grooms a bit of the fragrant chamomile and lemon-balm brew from his paw. 

Even _Perry_ smells of vanilla and cinnamon, the scent of it clinging to his cream-and-sable coat as he readjusts around her shoulders. He isn't the sort of cat that she's accustomed to, far more long of limb and graceful than the Kul Tiran tomcats that prowl the docks, a creature with a slender countenance and the largest ears she has ever seen on a cat. His eyes are beautiful, she muses, blue as the spring sky and half-lid as he laps at his dampened paw and then boldly dips it back toward her cup.

"You're going to spoil him," Lirath remarks from his position sprawled upon a gold-and-green quilt, the paneling of which reveals the semblance of falling leaves. Chin propped in the heel of his hand, his feet kicked up behind him, he teases, "And then what'll I do with him? Or _you_ , for that matter?"

With a quiet, thoughtful hum in response, Jaina traces the arcane symbol on the pages before her and then looks up to offer in a hopeful lilt, "I was thinking you could provide me safe haven until Winter Veil, and I'll help you pass your enchantment final?"

A chuckle follows, Lirath's expression warm and his stormy grey eyes as brightly mischievous as his cat's as he shoots back, "Just because Keelsil moved out doesn't mean I'm looking for a roommate. And then there's all this royalty that would be crowing at my doorstep. Honestly, Perriren brings me enough birds without there being a whole peacocking Sunstrider on my doorstep."

"Do you hear him, Perry?" Jaina frowns softly at the cat in question, lifting her hand to scratch him under the chin for good measure. Perriren simply stretches languidly, bumping his head into her cheek and purring all the more for her attention. "Slandering your good name. Making light of your contributions to this household."

"One," Lirath lifts a slender fingertip in emphasis, "This is not a household. Two, I'm not hiding you under my bed like a Gilnean refugee for anything less than help with enchantment and summoning, thank you. Besides which. Wouldn't your _absolute battleaxe_ of a mother have kittens if she knew you'd taken up with a man who wasn't seven feet tall and thicker than cold molasses?"

And _that_ makes her uncertain, a touch too aware of the steady heat creeping up the back of her neck, " _Lirath_."

"I mean, he has a nice ass, I guess," the aforementioned elf continues idly, as if he were commenting on the weather. "But _Belore_ , Jaina, you could do better. You could probably throw a rock into a crowd and do better."

She outright grimaces at that, sinking a measure further into her chair and lifting her book a little higher as she all but scowls at the parchment. It honestly isn't all that unusual for Lirath to tease her, particularly where she and her...and what would she call Arthas? _Paramour_? Particularly where _Arthas_ \- she settles on - is concerned, as largely harmless as he is. She still doesn't want to overthink the particulars of that much.

To be honest, she doesn't want to think or feel much of anything at her seeming obligation to become a Menethil in the future, despite the brimming excitement of her nation at the prospect. And it's not as if Arthas has asked about their future prospects much of late, but... Jaina rubs the back of her neck uncomfortably and frowns perhaps a touch deeper - she has her suspicions that he may try to press the topic at Winter Veil, given his ham-handed inquiries about the Proudmoore holdings and poorly-hidden letters. 

Which, to her mind, seems a touch ridiculous. They've not even kissed. He'd attempted the once, but she turned her head to avoid it. The golden scruff at his jaw had scratched her cheek. She hadn't found it enjoyable, chaste as it has turned, nor how he had praised her for her modesty and apologized for his uncouth behavior. And she doesn't know, at this point, which bit is worse: that he believes she needs to be _praised_ for it, or that she never felt anything at the prospect of his lips brushed to hers. 

And Arthas is, well. 

_Arthas_. 

Good-natured to a fault and admittedly a bit...thick, as Lirath was fond of putting it. And she doesn't want to hurt him, either. It's just that she's less certain about so many things of late. This isn't at all like the books that she's read, devoured in the candelit hours between midnight and dawn. It's the cover, and none of the substance. She feels warmth for him, to be certain, but no warmth at the prospect of being with him, and at that particular thought, she can all but hear her mother's voice in her head telling her to grow up.

But must growing up require martyring herself on the Menethil name for the sake of appearances? She thinks upon that with resignation. The number of years she'd live land-locked, watching Arthas polish his armor and boast about his horse and the fine Arathi bloodlines that it came from, which she can now trace back _six generations_ and not by _choice_.

_He's harmless_ , Jaina reminds herself. _He's harmless, and awfully sweet. And save for his rivalry with the heir-apparent of Silvermoon, he has many redeeming qualities._

_Like what?_ Lirath's countenance seems to say, as if he knew exactly the turn her thoughts have taken.

So as Jaina sighs this time, she finds it's with far less contentedness, her wintery eyes slipping closed. When they open, she starts to find the elf's keenly grey ones only a scarce measure away, reading her like an open book. 

Lirath moves like a _cat_ , leaning up and over the arm of her chair to rest half-sprawled on the bunk and half-sprawled in her lap, his silver-blonde hair a river of muted argent that spills over the yellowed pages as he eyes her with a far more critical expression than Perry's.

Lirath is _beautiful_. He's beautiful and he _knows_ it, and his confidence is a force of its own, one the likes of Jaina does not think she will ever possess. She's seen him approach men and women alike with peerless ease and a charming smile, a circumstance that has led - unfortunately - to her know almost exactly how many of them graced the bunk in this room before Keelsil left. In spite of her loud protests about the conversation, and at least once, having covered his face with a pillow and pretended to smother him while he described a particularly colorful tryst with Stromgardian twins.

He has the sort of firm and angular countenance that only an elf could have, elegant at every turn, the ears shifting expressively with his moods. A truly lovely man, and as he kisses her chastely upon the cheek even now, the only one that she trusts.

Jaina wrinkles her nose at him, a smile turning the corner of her lips as he wrinkles his back, playfully in turn. And that's the thing, isn't it? She loves Lirath. But not the way that she read about in books, either, and instead with the same steady warmth that she feels for Derek, for Tandred. For A- _No_.

"You're getting maudlin," Lirath chastizes, looking up at her with his gold-silver hair spread like a halo beneath him. Catching up her hand, he ties a simple loop of thread around the ring finger and announces with aplomb. "Problem solved. Jaina Windrunner has a nice ring to it, don't you think?"

The laugh that bubbles out of her is as warm as it is genuine, her head tilting back against the chair for a moment before she uses her newly-adorned hand to shove lightly at his face, countering with a haughty, "That'll be Lirath _Proudmoore_ , thank you." And then, shoving him lightly again, a fond look about her, "You're on my book."

His lips curl up impishly at that, revealing a hint of curiously sharp teeth before the lanky bastard moves _up instead of back_ , wrestling his way into the chair alongside her until he's managed to cram himself beneath her arm and taken the book for his own.

"Ohh," and he's laughing now, too, playing a game of keep-away with the tome at the advantage of his ridiculously long arms. Ignoring the hand she's smushing his face with as she attempts to shove him off, he announces, "Look at the _top_ jump out of this one, Perry. And how do you feel about my pending affairs with the good lords and ladies of your Admiralty, my betrothed?"

"You are _such an ass_ , Lirath," Jaina exclaims with a breathless laugh, half-constricted by the shit-heap of elf sprawled half-over and under her. "And what do you mean the top? The top of bloody what?"

At that, he blinks slowly up at her and then laughs all the louder, "Jaina Proudmoore, you sweet summer child. Do you mean to tell me you don't know what a top i-"

**Knuckles sound upon the door.**

It's a sound that silences both of them with immediacy, Jaina's sea-blue eyes widening subtly and Lirath's ears atwitch as he scrambles off of her, straightening his shirt. He does not, however, move far from her and instead bends down to tease softly in her ear, "Are you really that innocent, or is the machismo poisoning starting to affect your higher functioning?"

She does manage to shove him at that, but he avoids the swat she aims at him afterwards, deftly stepping to the side and making her reason that he allowed the shove in the first place.

"I'm not innocent _just because_ I never know what you're on about," she retorts with a soft huff, blowing a honey-blonde tress out of her eyes. "I _do read_ , Lirath."

He tilts his head back a little with a laugh, looking for all the world like Perry with his long ears and mischievous eyes before glancing back down to swear to her, as solemn as any oath, "I'll find you some dirtier books. Let it never be said that a Windrunner shirked his duties in friendship or war."

"You've never been in a bloody war," Jaina shoots back with a snort, making a show of straightening her robes as rises from the chair, and tossing her book onto the cushions before moving as if to answer the door.

What she isn't expecting is the way he goes absolutely still for an instant at the third repitition of knuckles at his door. A sound with a rhythm to it that she cannot place, one that sounds bored, but distinct, and makes his mischievous eyes wide and wary for a split-second before he wraps an arm around her shoulders and covers her mouth with one hand.

"Wardrobe," he breathes in all but a whisper, a low, muttered oath made in his native tongue as he finds her elbow with one hand and, releasing her otherwise, steers her in the direction of the furnishing and waves her toward it.

"You can't be serious," Jaina says simply, looking in at a mess of hanging silk shirts and neatly-pressed trousers, a scarce few robes. It smells overwhelmingly of cinnamon in a way that makes her nose twitch. "Who are you even-"

" _The top of what_ ," he whispers back incredulously, ushering her in with more urgency as the same knock sounds, even slower this time. The way his ears twitch against his silver-gold head would almost be endearing, were he not actively attempting to coerce her into a cupboard. "You're about to _bloody well find out_ if you don't _get in the wardrobe_."

And then comes the voice from the other side, one that reminds her of woodfire smoke and the cool wind in the pines on the coast. One that cuts through her like the silver of a blade, feminine, but with a thrum of confident power behind it, as if the door itself were not truly a barrier but merely and _inconvenience._

"You know I can hear you scrabbling around in there like a frantic woodmouse, Little Lord Starshine?"

Something about it makes the fine hair rise on the back of her neck, and she looks toward the door with open curiosity, then to Lirath.

"No. Trust me. Just no," Lirath asserts with insistence.

"Can't you just pick the lock?" and _that's Kael'thas_ , sounding as bloody trite as ever.

"Because it's neither polite, nor legal," that cool, wind-in-the-trees timbre sounds once more, and it comes as some of a shock that someone would speak to him so plainly. "Or are you the Prince of Dalaran now, too?"

A haughty sound answers.

"Marris, why don't you escort the Prince out for a bit of air?"

Passing amusement reaches Lirath's eyes at that, but he only manages to look relieved when Jaina acquiesces to his request, rolling her eyes as she climbs up into the wardrobe and settles for the long haul, her knees pulled to her chest. The overwhelming scent of cinnamon pervades everything, causing her to sneeze loudly amidst the silk shirts, and Lirath to hurriedly hush her.

"Just how many people have you hidden in here?" Jaina hisses through a sniff, trying not to sneeze again and eyeing Lirath incredulously as he deftly undoes the buttons of his silken shirt to leave more than a fair measure of amber skin visible, then musses his hair.

"I don't kiss and tell," comes a hushed response, and he leaves the wardrobe door only slightly ajar, then crosses to the window to fling it wide open as if someone had made their egress in that direction.

"You _exclusively_ kiss and tell," Jaina snipes back all but inaudibly from within the wardrobe, trying not to sneeze again. 

_Another knock._

"Coming, Lady Moon!" Lirath calls toward the threshold, only to whisper back to Jaina, "Slander. Now. Quieter than a woodmouse or she'll catch you."

Half-hidden behind a curtain of silky vestments and all but invisible from behind the wardrobe door, Jaina tries not to succumb to the soft pleading mews of Perry, who has taken up a post beneath her hiding spot and is staring up with his tail atwitch, as if he desperately needs to be inside the wardrobe as well. He is only just thwarted on Lirath's crossing the room, the lanky elf steering the cat away with his side of his foot on the way to the door.

\---

Yet another afternoon spent trailing the prince as he fusses over this and that. One last series of obligations to fulfil to the crown before a fortnight on her own. Sylvanas has always vastly preferred her time in her homeland to _just about everywhere else_ , and Dalaran is swiftly becoming no exception to that rule. 

There will always be a part of her that the Eversong calls to. That finds some solace within the halls of white marble and the sun-drenched spires, but more in the particular shades of summer red-and-gold that cast through the leaves, the moss-limned stones on the banks of the river, the hidden trails through bracken and bramble that only a farstrider could hope to tread unscathed.

She prefers the Eversong to anywhere, but must admit that there is a certain anticipation in looking toward the morrow. An uncertainty. A wondering despite the leather saddlebags that need loaded onto her hawkstrider, if the slow ride toward Cinderlight Spire will be more than the gamble she anticipated. It will certainly be a gamble to convince her favorite gardener to leave it. 

And she much prefers Silvermoon to any city, still, and not in the least because it is rare that _Anasterian_ , as opposed to some, would have her running about in ceremonial armour for frivolous reasons. 

It is hardly her favorite armament, but then, she has always balked at it in some way. Perhaps because she remembers when it was her mother's armour. Perhaps because it is not so hard to imagine, even now, having stood outside her brother's room in a far different city as she has a thousand times over a thousand years within Windrunner Spire, when Lireesa Windrunner was not a memory but a presence that filled its halls - a woman magnificent in amber-gold and wine-drenched reds, mighty Thas'dorah slung across a shoulder.

The memory tastes bitter, even though it shouldn't. And Lirath has always managed to take after their mother the most, if only in appearance, a fact that she is intimately reminded of when he opens the door and looks at her with storm-coloured eyes. His slender shoulder comes to rest against the threshold, curiosity in his gaze and a confident smile curling the corner of his lips.

"You look like a tramp," it's not a customary greeting from Sylvanas, but an apt one. He's gone through some effort to look a mess, but to the keen eye? Staged. She can hear the shallow breathing of someone or another else, fights the urge to twitch an ear in the direction of the wardrobe.

His cocksure expression deflates minutely at the subtle arching of her brow. A conversation held with no words and only the subtle shift in one countenance or another, told in ways that only a Windrunner could truly hope to understand. Whoever he has is still in there. And he really, _really_ does not want their liege lord to become aware of it.

"And you wound me," Lirath quips in return, opening his arms to receive her and patting her back, armour and all, before holding her at arm's length to ask, "Did you come all this way to call me a tramp? In full... whatever this is." Then, in far more sultry a tone to the woman behind her, " _Hey Velonara_."

"Lirath. Darling," Velonara's response is seductively cool as she inspects her nails. Velonara, who has never been anything short of breathtaking a day in her life, all dark lashes and dark tresses and eyes the colour of wine. "If I wanted to settle for the second-best Windrunner, I'd pull Vereesa out from under whatever sweaty human she's taken up with this year."

She cannot help but reach out at that, a bow-calloused hand finding the other woman's hip and apply a faint pressure with her fingertips. A breath of, "Behave," in the instant before her touch recedes.

Velonara emits a pronounced sigh at that, as if the notion itself were the cause of great pain to her.

And _that's_ a pointed look.

Now Lirath is looking between the two of them with unadulterated curiosity, his hurry to conceal his company all but forgotten as he asks her directly, "You two are off again?"

"Your sister," Velonara observes in that wine-dark cadence, cool as ever as she strips off her gloves and presses them to Lirath's chest as she steps into the room. "Has taken up _months_ of celibacy for some little _florist_ who doesn't even _know her name_. It's all positively _tragic_."

It's Sylvanas's turn to sigh, a short exhalation through her nose, "You're being dramatic. And I didn't bring you here to gossip with my brother."

"You didn't," Velonara answers back, and how did she find a bottle of wine already? It's dusty, old, the label starting to peel - and the other ranger twists the cork out with a practiced motion, taking a sip directly from it before looking out the window. "You brought me here because you're about to off on _holiday_ with some girl you haven't so much as introduced us to, and you're leaving me with Theron and _Brightwing_. I'm allowed to sulk."

Sylvanas leans a forearm against the doorframe, shaking her head as she replies in a patient warning, "Velonara."

Velonara scoffs in response, dark eyes cutting as if to the marrow, extracting the truth behind the bone, "It's not as if Kael will hear you from downstairs - especially over Marris. Even his _breathing_ is loud."

"You're seeing _some girl_ now? As in steady?" Lirath inquires with far more interest than he should have for that fact, his ear shifting to the side as Perry takes up pouncing after something near the window, merrily making a game of it. He can't hear the subtle footsteps the way she can - and she suspects she knows who their visitor is all the same. "Are you ill? Are you dying? What's her name?"

"I'm presently _hunting down_ an acquaintance of yours," Sylvanas replies smoothly, her gaze flicking toward the wardrobe pointedly as someone stifles a sneeze. "So the prince can take her on an afternoon stroll or something equally wasteful of my time. I told him I wasn't adverse to roughing you up for the information, but that it would be best if he wasn't present for it - what with his delicate constitution."

"Cinderlight," and with _that_ admission from her traitorous third-in-command, Velonara and Lirath are little gossips all at once, both ignoring the way her ear twitches in annoyance as she simply rolls her eyes and shuts the door behind herself. 

Sylvanas isn't particularly interested to know what it is about that surname that sobered her brother's expression all at once, what makes his brows knit together sharply in that way, the one that belies concern. She's heard rumours, of course. Cautiously explored them, in as much as she can to avoid arousing suspicion - or at least, more suspicion than Velonara may have.

And what has she found for it? Not much to make anything of. Certainly no reason to stop the pleasant afternoons she's whiled away in the garden. Simply the same sort of gossip that many make in regard to pretty girls whe one dislikes them, or desires them and cannot have them. Cruel in most instances, but unimportant as a whole. 

And for a moment, she's beneath the suntrees in the waning light, listening to a silk-smooth cadence elaborate on this or that. Paying far more attention to the minute gestures, delicate motions of the hand, a faint curl to the corner of the lips. To the way those silvery eyes don't hesitate to meet her own. 

"That's..." and his voice has dropped to a hiss now, almost nothing but a whisper, as if they might be overheard. " _Belore_ , you are the _worst_ , you know that? The absolute _worst_. How did you even manage to- Do you even know how many sanctions the Convocation dropped on h- Hey _listen_." He holds his fingers a scarce bit apart, "I heard they sanctioned her for necromancy. _Necromancy_ , Sylvanas. As in, hey let me borrow a part of your _soul_ like a cup of sugar."

_Necromancy_. She supposes that is a new one, halts the way her ear wants to twitch and keeps her countenance even, nonplussed in response. Almost can't hide a soft snort of amusement at the purr of a whisper just shy of her ear, stirring in her dawn-gold ear, and if she hadn't suspected that Vintel was afoot based on the cat's antics alone, she knows for certain when the assassin breathes, "She could borrow my soul like a cup of sugar. Bake a cake with it and everything. I bet it'd be _delicious_."

"Hush," is the word she breathes, only just, and she has to fight the temptation to chuckle warmly in any case. 

"Do you even realize how- You aren't even listening to me, are you?" Lirath asserts with a certain familial exasperation.

"Not particularly. I think we both know that you're stalling for time," Sylvanas observes dryly, keen eyes meeting her brother's and a brow arched pointedly. She takes another stride forward before adding, "And poorly, at that."

"I'm not _stalling_. I'm trying to warn you that-" he cuts off suddenly as she steps forward, taking a step back that brings his shoulders flush with the wardrobe. Narrow-eyed of a sudden and his hands upraised, "If you make me eat cobwebs again, I'm going to scream. And then report you to the magocracy."

"I haven't made you eat _cobwebs_ in _centuries_ ," is the response, and she cranes her head to the side a scarce measure, listening to the soft scraping sound from behind the wardrobe door as someone shifts uncomfortably therein. "Although I suppose I could make an exception. Just this once. For nostalgia's sake."

Their scuffle is impromptu, but comes to a predictable end with her arm tight around his neck, his head held fast between her upper arm and the cuirass of her armour, his silver-blonde hair mussed as he goes limp within her grasp as if the deadweight will force her to drop him. And when it fails to, he licks the mirrored finish of a golden vambrace and her nose wrinkles in disgust.

It doesn't stop her from yanking open the door to the wardrobe, or hearing the sudden gasp therein as the young woman taking shelter in it hits the back of the furnishing with a suden gasp, trying and failing to hide between a row of silken shirts. Those eyes are wide and guileless from the shock of her discovery.

And the first impression that Sylvanas Windrunner has is that this girl is _young_ , younger still than her little brother tended and _far too_ tender in years to become entangled with Kael'thas. But she is lovely, lovely and indelicate in a way that only humans have ever seemed to master. Her blonde hair is braided out of her eyes, which remind Sylvanas of the sea and shimmer with the arcane as if something laid beneath. 

She is everything the Prince would find a way to covet and _should not_ , all that her brother never would - decidedly not his type, if the last thirty-eight or so paramours could be used for comparison.

"Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-General of Silvermoon," is what she asserts in a smooth cadence, all Ranger-General as she holds out a gilded hand. "You must be Jaina Proudmoore."

\-- 

Lirath never told her that his sister was this _tall_ , or golden, or gloriously...anything like this. _Handsome_. Beautiful. Anything and everything in between, with eyes middling between the grey of the horizon and the subtle amber of a new dawn, the colour all the richer for the hint of charcoal that limns them, for its contrast with lashes the hue of autumn wheat. He never told her that she would have the lean, athletic shoulders of a practiced bowman, or that the hand that hers slips into would be so warm to the touch, subtly calloused and firm. 

Or that that touch would send a spark of something through her, something as warm and golden as the sunlight. 

And when she's drawn to her feet with an effortless grace, stands in front of all that golden elf and golden armour, Jaina Proudmoore, middle child of Katherine and Daelin Proudmoore of Kul Tiras, who has spent the whole of her life before Dalaran amidst sailors and the rough seas, quite simply forgets how breathing is supposed to work. 

She looks like late summer tilting into autumn. She smiles like a lynx with particularly endearing canary, and Jaina swallows hard at the sharper incisor at that, can feel her pulse hammering in her throat, the clamminess of her hands, the warmth in her cheeks all at once. 

They have to be siblings, she thinks, when Lirath pipes up, "Stay really still, she can't see you if you don't move."

And she could swear she sees a teacup moving around near the windowsill of its own volition, Perry merrily batting at something she cannot see, but that has to be her imagination, doesn't it? 

They have to be siblings, what with how the woman's other hand finds Lirath's face and simply shoves him away with a muttered protest - his - and then musses his hair afterwards. Must be. Tan would have done that to her without a second's hesitation, possibly even tipped her overboard after, even. 

"You know," and _Tides_ , even her voice sounds like the summer, and _why is it so difficult_ not to look at her mouth when she speaks? The corner of those lips curl just so at noticing her looking, and that's somehow worse. "I think it would be _my pleasure_ to escort you, if you elect to take the Prince up on his offer."

But she can't help but see the momentary flicker of something, an emotion that she cannot place, before the taller woman mouths what looks like _she's so young_ incredulously to Lirath, a smooth recovery of, "He's always on his best behavior when I'm about, and I haven't seen much of Dalaran, in truth."

"I- Yes," and is that her voice that sounds like that? _Tides. Get a grip, Jaina._ She doesn't know what's come over her, but she can hear herself saying, "He's very..." she wracks her mind for the word, coming up with, "Polite? But very...insistent. It would be pleasant to have company. I suspect I'll have little peace until this is concluded."

And Jaina cannot fathom the conversation that follows, but knows it must be one, written in the subtle shifting of elven ears, in the minute movements of a hand here or a glance there, until the dark-haired woman rolls her eyes and Lirath seems at least, somewhat, assuaged, the tension melting from his shoulders. 

"Royalty is always like that," Sylvanas...that's her name, isn't it?...winks a dawn-grey eye and offers her an arm, she takes it - _Tides_ , she takes it - all the while continuing in that charmingly smooth voice, "Would you care to know a secret?"

"Mm?" Jaina makes a sound in the back of her throat as they head for the door, tries to focus on the cool metal beneath her hand when their arms are laced and not how this woman smells like a _forest in the sunlight_ , like woodsmoke and pine and a hint of leather in a way that almost reminds her of the woodlands that border the coast. 

It is briefly amusing to her to see Lirath embattled in getting Perry out of the curtains, and the teacup is on top of the...curtain rod now, which strikes her as particularly odd. 

"You know," and that smooth voice seems to dip a little lower, a touch conspiratory as the Ranger-General confides near her ear, "When I've to spend unwanted time with the Prince, I just nod and say yes. He hardly ever notices, enamored as he is with hearing himself speak."

And that makes her look up in surprise for its candor, well aware that her sea-blue eyes have found those gold-grey, "Isn't that a bit rude, General?"

"Ranger-General," Sylvanas asserts smoothly, but the affect is somewhat lost with the twinkle in those eyes, as if mischief dwelt their for an instant. There's a teasing note to that voice when it asks, "They don't dress me as a pompous, gilded bird for nothing, Miss Proudmoore. And it's only rude if you get caught."

"Now I know you're related to Lirath," Jaina answers back with a soft snort, but this feels good. It feels familiar, like a storm-tossed deck starting to settle beneath her feet, not yet easy, but better than it was before. "That sounds _exactly_ like something he'd say. Your armour looks splendid."

She doesn't catch what's said behind them, but an ear snaps back, and the tall elf shoots a warning look over one shoulder at someone - whether the accompanying ranger or her brother, Jaina is uncertain. 

"Pompous," comes the teasing whisper back, "I much prefer my hunting leathers, but thank you."

"I bet you look dashing in either," Jaina muses out loud, all too aware as the statement catches up to her that there's a sharp uptick in colour at her own cheekbones and an elven ear has shifted in her direction. She clears her throat softly, asks instead, "Do you make a habit of undermining your liege-lord?"

"Never," and a soft slyness touches that warm cadence, Sylvanas careful to wait for her to take each stair on their way down toward the entrance of the dormitory. "I'm certain after such time in my brother's _illustrious_ company, you are well aware that Windrunners are nothing if not the paragon of good behavior. Besides, that's the thing about trying generals for insubordination. You start losing wars."

She actually laughs at the accompanying wink of one heather-grey eye, a sound that makes Lirath's ears perk up, makes him look over at her in alarm from a few paces off, though he seems to decide that everything is fine and starts to try his chances with the elegant, dark-haired ranger that accompanied them. Velonara? Was that her name?

"I'll have to mention that to my father, next there's a dispute within the Admiralty," Jaina intones with a laugh, and to her surprises, she's actually starting to have a good time. Wonders if it will evaporate like so much mist in the sunlight as she spots Kael'thas, all scarlet robes and pomp, near the fountain outside - looking done to death with the gruff human man beside him, also in Silvermoon gold.

"Smart girl," Sylvanas replies as they hit the lowest step, looks at her from behind pale gold lashes and confides, "Now, we give him...half an hour, enough for a proper tour, yes? And then you have to off and-"

At a slight hand-motion, she realizes that the other is waiting for her to fill in that blank, offers hesitantly, "Meet with Antonidas?"

"Meet with Antonidas," the taller woman asserts as smoothly as anything, pausing and pointing toward a nearby banner on the wall as if asking her a question, but confiding instead, "It would be impolite for him to object in front of us, and he shouldn't ask you off on your own for at least a fortnight after - any less is scandalous. He'd look like a bad elf."

"Is that common, the fortnight?" Jaina inquires at that, suddenly curious, and sees an ear lift in what she presumes must be surprise. 

The corner of those lips curls just so, the woman beside her observing impishly, "Only if one cares about being a bad elf."

"Nathanos!" Sylvanas's voice rings out louder, its smooth cadence more commanding as they draw up to the fountain arm-in-arm. Jaina could swear there's a little sparkle in those grey eyes when the bearded man beside Kael'thas looks up at them with _obvious relief_ , trots over in an instant. "This is Miss Jaina Proudmoore of Kul Tiras. She's graciously agreed to give us a tour of the city while we're visiting the prince."

His hand is massive, leather-gloved despite the armour over it, and envelops the whole of hers when he shakes it briefly. She wonders if he picked that habit up after so long living with the elves, uncommon as it is between men and women otherwise.

"Nathanos Marris of Lordaeron," Nathanos has a dry timbre, one that she thinks must sound condescending to those he's not well-acquainted with, but the smile behind his beard looks genuine enough. He reminds her some of the gruff sailors back home, though she can't put her finger quite on why. "Pleasure to meet you, Miss Proudmoore."

"And you've met Velonara," Sylvanas observes as if in thought, nodding toward the svelte woman nearby. 

"Duskwither, of Silvermoon," comes a smoothly seductive cadence at that, one that seems distinctly in line for the way Velonara never looks up from inspecting her nails. 

Kael'thas clears his throat a touch loudly then, striding over with scarlet robes billowing around his feet, and looks about to speak - but stops just as suddenly as he meets his General's gaze. And she could swear, just swear in that instant, that those warm grey eyes are _livid_ when they lock to his, that Sylvanas's ears have shifted back subtly and the lean shoulders set, something unspoken between them that looks like a challenge.

He opts for a cautious, but somewhat slighted, "It is lovely of you to accept _my_ invitation, Miss Proudmoore. I am always grateful for the pleasure of your company, as you know."

And what can she say to that, when she has spent the better part of today attempting to avoid him. She opts for a polite smile, offers simply, "A walk would do me well, clear my head from the day's studies."

All that hard grey has thankfully softened when the Ranger-General looks down at her, prompting gently, "Well then. As our resident expert, where would you suggest that we begin?"

"We could head over to th-" she starts to say.

Only to feel her blood run cold as another voice rings out from down the way, soon accompanied by the sound of armour jingling as its wearer breaks out into a brisk jog to catch up to them, " _Jaina!_ "

"Oh, here we bloody go," Lirath mutters to the other side of her, and she feels rather than sees the way his arm loops through hers pre-emptively, fingers lacing comfortably through her own and giving her hand a squeeze. He murmurs near her ear, "Two Windrunner escort, lucky you."

She tries and mostly succeeds in combating the quiet laugh that threatens to escape when she hears Sylvanas tease from the other side of her, "She'd be luckier if you were Sylvos. Matching set."

"She'd be bored to tears, listening to him off about the effects of a short spring on Arathi silks and asking after the quality of this season's Kul Tiran broadcloth, you mean?" Lirath jabs back with ease. They're definitely siblings. 

The sound of armour draws louder and louder still, and there he is, rounding the corner toward them. She'd know him anywhere, even without the sour look that's crossed Kael'thas Sunstrider's countenance for the sudden appearance, as if the heir of Silvermoon had not just spotted Arthas Menethil, but had instead trod in griffon shit. 

They drop into Thalassian then, and hers isn't good enough to tell what's said beyond - _number two_ \- and - _hat?_ That can't be right.

Arthas is taller than any of them _by far_ , an easy six and a half feet of slightly winded princeling, one that so many could and have been so easily charmed by. One that she has known since they were both children, and he still has the same broad smile, the same intrepid glint in his blue eyes as he says, looking at her alone and not reading the room in the slightest which is fairly ah...typical, "I've been looking for you all day. I was going to take you for a ride on Invincible."

Always coming up with plans without asking her what she'd care to do, all assumptions, just as he had been when they were young and all he wanted to play was bandits and knights, and she wanted to play pirates and navy. 

"Ah, you must be the young Lord Menethil," Nathanos thankfully breaks in, and the two men clap hands briefly, Arthas staring down at the human ranger with a dim sort of fascination as they make introductions. 

Still, as vexed as she is by the situation, she cannot help but shake her head and smile just a little. 

That is, until Lirath whispers in a hushed and quite frankly horrified timbre, "Did he name his _dick_ Invincible?"

She hears Sylvanas at her other shoulder as the Ranger-General tries and fails to withhold a snort, tries to ignore how her ears are burning from the embarrassment as she hisses back, " _His horse, **Lirath**._ Invincible is the name of _his horse_."

"Ah, _that_ Marris," Arthas has taken up with Nathanos already, as if the shorter man were just another soldier in the Stratholme army. "How do you find it, serving with the Ranger-General? I've heard he's unmatched with a bow. Elves. Always been more of a sword man, myself. It just has more... _heft_ to it, you know."

_Elves_.

You could knock Jaina over with a feather.

_You are surrounded by elves, Arthas. Heft?_

Even Nathanos seems a little taken aback by that, if the way his dark brows lift and dark eyes widen subtly is any indication. He scratches the back of his neck, recovers with an uncomfortable chuckle, "Well, my Lord. I find _her_ rather tough, but fair. As you would any good commander. But you, uh-"

" _Belore_ ," a smooth, dark cadence cuts in, more than a hint of bite to it as Velonara, "Before you give yourself some sort of affliction. Lord..." she doesn't even attempt at a name, but gestures rather vaguely in Arthas's direction in its stead, and then toward Sylvanas, "Sylvanas Windrunner, Ranger-General of Quel'Thalas."

She wonders, from the brief look of relief on Marris's face, if the brief hand gesture between them means: _you're welcome._

Arthas has the ill grace to look _surprised_ at that, his blonde brows lifting as he seems to take stock of the remainder of their company all at once. With a disarming smile, the sort learned in a lifetime in the shadow of the throne, he confides with a bit of a chuckle, "I can never tell with Thalassian names, and it's not all that common in Stratholme for...you know. My apologies."

And if the look Sylvanas leveled upon Kael'thas earlier was scathing, the one the Ranger-General adopts now is nothing short of _unimpressed_ , if unsurprised by that revelation. She is nonetheless the first to speak after that, an ear twitching just so as if at Jaina's _obvious_ discomfort, and that summer-warm timbre is soothing to her ears despite its lack of overt empathy for him, "A peculiarity of human custom I am not well-versed in, I'm afraid. But yes. My sisters Alleria and Vereesa are rangers as well, and my mother served as Ranger-General before me."

All of that. All of that, still does not quite prepare her for the way Arthas dips into a short and fairly respectable bow and intones to _Lirath and Velonara_ , "Pleasure to meet you, ladies."

She can hear Lirath breathe, "I hate him," near her ear.

Kael'thas looks fit to vibrate out of his over-sized shoulderpads and Nathanos looks like he would rather be _anywhere but here_. 

"Arthas," Jaina manages of a sudden, her countenance still hot with embarassment on his behalf, and hers, "This is Lirath, he studies in Dalaran. You've met him. Velonara is one of Syl- the Ranger-General's farstriders. I'm taking them on a tour of the city."

"Oh." And how does he manage to look a little petulant at that, brows knitting together as he looks down at her. He recovers swiftly, however, that smile returned as he asserts, "The more the merrier? Jaina is an excellent guide. Wait until you see the Violet W-"

While it is a much more crowded time than Jaina had hoped for as they start off into the city, it is far from the worst one she has ever had. Lirath and Sylvanas, she is learning as they banter back and forth in hushed voices, are both _terrible_ influences on her and one another. But it's nice, and somehow easy, like listening to her brothers bicker over the breakfast table. And Sylvanas, to her credit, seems to have taken a genuine interest in the tour itself, prompting her with occasional smooth questions to steer the conversation when they're interrupted. They are becoming easier and easier to answer with the passage of time.

The company is more than worth the occasional interruption.

"So you primarily use the bow?" Arthas intones in the midst of a short, pleasant conversation about the use of fire magic to temper glass. "How does that work?"

"Well." It isn't lost on her, how that summery cadence is a touch dry with amusement now, or how slowly heather grey eyes lift from hers as the Ranger-General intones, "I tend to point it at things, and then fire."

The curl to the corner of those lips is criminal.

_Get a grip, Jaina. What is wrong with you?_

In any case, Arthas emits a short laugh before countering, "Any bladework?"

He wants to talk about his _sword_ more. _Tides_.

"Some, but not that sort," the answer is kept short, vague, as Sylvanas's head nods toward the pommel of the sword strapped to his back - then tilts to the side when Jaina's arm shifts subtly within her own, attention returning swiftly where it once was. 

"Remember when Tandred tried to take me out hunting on your nameday?" Arthas teases lowly as they walk along, and with that smile he is suddenly that same boy she knew, the one that was all gangly limbs and skinned knees, who used to sneak out onto the docks to watch the ships come in with her. "And we got lost for six hours on the border of Drustvar?"

"The search party?" Jaina can't help but laugh a little at that, cracking a grin as she informs the elf beside her, "We found them in an abandoned watchpost trying to make a fire to roast apples, because they couldn't fell anything. It made for a very exciting fourteenth nameday."

"Funny to think that was almost four years ago," Arthas adds, shaking his head. "I wouldn't get lost _now_."

"We wouldn't lose you now, not with all that armour," Jaina shoots back, mirth in her blue eyes. "We'd hear you a mile off."

Beside her, a long ear has shifted up decidedly, and heather grey eyes seem to narrow faintly. It isn't lost on her for long, how every last elf in their company has gone, quite suddenly still, with the exception of Kael'thas who is suddenly occupied with inspecting the flagstones a few paces off.

"That must make you-" there's a slow pause in which she thinks Sylvanas runs her tongue over her teeth in thought.

"Seventeen," Velonara supplies helpfully, and somehow, in that dark cadence it sounds like a _death sentence_. 

Heather grey and gold, those expressive eyes blink once and ever-so-slowly, before she watches them narrow faintly upon the errant Sunstrider once more, and what the Ranger-General observes in a low lilt, "I see."

"Well, this evening has been lovely and it was gracious of you to take me up on my invitation, Jaina, but we should be returning to Silvermoon shortly," Kael'thas interjects, a measure of the confidence in his voice diminished. He steps nearer then, hand extended as if in hopes to take her own, "You shall have to let me know if you wish a tour there someday, it would be my pleasure to host you."

"Write ahead if you do visit," is what Sylvanas corrects for him soon afterward, a series of subtle expressions touching those eyes and those ears as the taller woman and Lirath look to one another. "It wouldn't do to have you without a proper escort, Miss Proudmoore, and Windrunner Spire is near the sea. I think you may like it."

And then, without much concern for the prince's outstretched hand, that golden gauntled one takes hers and lifts it, places a chaste kiss to the knuckles in farewell. The hard look leveled at Sunstrider afterward makes him drop his own, tuck it back into the sleeve of his robe. 

"Lirath can provide you with where to send a missive," Sylvanas adds as if it were merely fact, and one that Lirath looks simultaneously relieved and discomforted by. "It was a pleasure to meet you." And then, with a nod, "Lord Menethil."

And just as suddenly as they were there - the delegation from Silvermoon disappates into the streets - though she could swear she hears the terse sound of Thalassian in the distance shortly afterward, the words incomprehensible on the wind. 

"So," Lirath's voice breaks the silence a moment later. "Who wants to go get cake?"

\---

Her knuckles rap soundly upon the door, the one on the balcony. The one so far up that only a fool or a farstrider would have decided to climb it. But, she is the Ranger-General after all, Sylvanas thinks, her ear atwitch at the sound of movement inside, and perhaps that makes her both of those things in an equal measure. Somewhere far below her in the garden, her hawkstrider has nested down for the even in a bed of poppies, a gleam of golden plumage at the heart of so much coral and red. Somewhere far below her, a well-used leather pack is hidden in the eaves, ready for the coming of the dawn and her erstwhile journey to the coast.

She doesn't know, even now, if anything she has to say will sway the spire's inhabitant to come with her. If there is any way at all, in fact, to convince the realm's palest que'ldorei to take a few steps beyond the grounds for the first time in almost five hundred years. And that strikes her odd, makes a furrow in her brow at the sound of something set upon a dresser inside, of a chair moving back. That this feeling is unfamiliar. 

That uncertainty has not been an old friend since she was little but a stripling youth, hands fumbling upon a bow. 

Sylvanas Windrunner is used to many things, but one of them is getting _exactly what she wants_. At least in this regard. Used to, she contemplates with some introspection as dragonhawks call in the high branches and dart across the silvery face of the moon, pretty girls who fall first into her bed and then out of it just as easily. She feels unaccustomed to _whatever this is_ , to calling on someone in the dead of night, to the simplicity of a life stripped of her titles and accolades. 

Unused to being just anything. Just a ranger. Just a Windrunner. Just Sylvanas, and that particular thought is one that rankles. One that she does not linger upon long.

In its stead, the Ranger-General of Silvermoon leans her shoulder against the outer wall of Cinderlight Spire, crosses an ankle over the other, and waits as if she were just anyone. Casts a keen grey gaze over the trees to watch the little flickers of silver here and there as the hatchlings take to the hunt, testing their wings in pursuit of the fireflies that drift through the boughs. The nest must only be a little higher, Sylvanas muses, when one of the creatures alights on the balcony to peep insolently at her, as if scolding her for being so high up that only it belongs. 

And then there is the soft sound of footsteps. When the door opens, it all but darts back it into the leaves. When the door opens, the soft warmth of a miniature sun spills out to bathe the leaves in blood and gold. She cannot tell the source, but it casts a shadow of cool darkness from the silhouette that stands within the threshold, catches in strands of silk-smooth hair to weave them with light.

But those eyes are all the moon, cool and silver when they meet hers. 

Capricious.

And to be certain, she has enjoyed her share of women in her centuries, but none of them have ever looked at her like _this_ \- held her whole in the way that Morilinde of Cinderlight threatens to. As if in clear view of all those facets that rest beneath the surface, neither ranger nor general, but real beneath them. 

Morilinde holds her gaze in a moment of prolonged silence, combs slender fingers through silken hair as if to straighten it. As if it needed it. _Has she ever not looked perfect?_ Sylvanas wonders with the faintest hint of a smirk. Doubts it with every fiber of her being. And there is something to it, after all. All silver-blue eyes and ivory lashes, all dripping silk on the cusp of midnight.

"You're very early for the garden," falls silk-smooth from those lips, and it is the first thing Morilinde says to her.

"I'm not here for the garden," Sylvanas answers, her head canting to the side. It's easy, then, tipping a knuckle beneath a pale jaw, ducking down to press a soft kiss to the corner of softer lips. When her hand falls, the knuckle of it comes to rest just so at the apex of the other's sternum. She observes with some satisfaction, "This is a good look on you."

The look she receives for _that_ is so much more cool than it could be, cuts like a blade in shimmering silver, heavy with an unspoken utterance of _you would look good on me_. And that sends a thrill through her, makes her lean subtly closer. Morilinde smells of roses and vanilla, enticingly of arcane in the chill evening air, and that gaze never shifts from hers. Not once.

"Where is Vintel?" and that voice is much the same. Morilinde lifts a hand to tuck a scarce few strands of dawn-coloured hair behind her ear, and the touch lingers there, a thumb stroking there in a soft repetition that makes her want to close her eyes, sends a molten warmth through her. 

"On her way," Sylvanas asserts slowly, her grey eyes falling half-lid as she leans into the touch. At least a quarter of an hour if the royal assassin is, indeed, briefing their king on the events in Dalaran. "It won't be that much longer."

"Good." Morilinde is succinct as anything, but there's a shift, something contemplative to that elegant countenance in the midnight hour, to the way that a solitary nail traces the back of her ear before the hand withdraws. The words, when they fall, fall in Old Thalassian from the curve of pale lips, but the eyes hold her still; quicksilver and mercury in the moonlight, looking up from behind ivory lashes, " _It's a pity you've no name. I have half a mind to take you to bed_."

It is a statement that rests between them as easily as anything, a blade slid just so from the scabbard but not unsheathed. Offered instead, as if she could take the hilt of it, test the weight of it.

Sylvanas responds as only she can, bracing a forearm against the outer wall of the estate and leaning in until they are all but nose to nose, keen grey eyes to silver-blue. A bow-calloused fingertip comes to rest at the hollow of Morilinde's throat, shifts the silk along a collarbone until it slides from a moonpale shoulder. Not immodest yet, but another move in the game that they play one to another. 

"You could make an exception for me," Sylvanas murmurs in a lower timbre, like the summer wind in the pines. "I wouldn't tell."

She doesn't miss the way those silver-blue eyes flick toward her lips at that, and it makes them curl at the corner. And she hasn't been stopped just yet, considers that she would promise on her name if she could bring herself to cede the higher ground.

So she does what she does best. Presses her luck. 

Sylvanas Windrunner is nothing if not cocksure confidence as she quirks more of a smile, tilts her head in a scarce measure further to enunciate in that same archaic language, " _Now be a good girl and let me in_."

Her Old Thalassian is rusty, not a common tongue but not far from it, and she remembers enough of it from the lessons in her youth to make it work. All the worst parts, specifically, and if the reaction she garners is any indication, her companion is familiar with the double entendre to that particular phrasing. 

The way that Morilinde laughs is not what she had anticipated, nor is the delight on that fair countenance, more emotion she has seen oft. It reminds her of wind in the chimes that hang low in the trees. She can count on one hand the number of times she's heard this one laugh, betray so much of what lies beneath. 

And she finds that she wants to hear more of it, chases it to press a kiss to the corner of the other's lips, and then another, teasingly so. It earns her an honest one return, so much softer and sweeter than she anticipated, a kiss that feels like a cup of honeywine at Winter's Veil. It's a sharp juxtaposition, she finds, to the way her belt buckle has slid free with a whisper of brass and leather, her shirt hem is pulled loose with a certain ease.

The cool bite of nails when they ghost over her ribs, then nip into her back. And _Belore_ , those slender hands on her was worth the wait. 

" _You came to the wrong place for **good**_ ," Morilinde whispers against the corner of her lips, all in the span of a breath. 

She could start to like Old Thalassian, for all the strange melody in it. For all the way it hitches softly when she draws her teeth over the juncture of a pale neck and shoulder, threatens to bite gently. Morilinde slides a hand from her shirt when she does, but doesn't stop her, only strokes a thumb to the keen line of her jaw as if to trace the sharpest facets of her, take her measure. 

And when Sylvanas's head lifts, that touch traces over her lips next, and she nips the pad of the other's thumb gently as well. Presses a kiss to it afterward, keen eyes lifting to the other woman as she murmurs, the words shivering low in the dark between them, " _I **know**_."

She does know, as intimate as the taste of vanilla and rosewater on her teeth, the very nature of the game she's been hunting all this time. That it is as capricious as it is beautiful, as likely to turn her away here and now as it is to keep her. 

It lingers there in the sudden stillness, in the way silver-blue eyes are softly aglow beneath white lashes, how they shine like stars in the dark. When the words fall, they are smooth as silk and twice as lovely in Morilinde's voice, " _Then come inside_."

And the way _that's_ phrased in the ancient tongue isn't lost upon her, either.

It feels like the instant her fingertips loose the bowstring, sends the same thrill through her as the first time, prickles at the skin between her shoulders. Instead, her bow-calloused hands are finding the outside of thighs to ride up the silks. Instead, she is losing her shirt before they even make it inside, and perfectly manicured nails are tracing the edges of scars she forgot that she had in the dim amber light.

Instead, she is following the slow one, two steps it takes back through the threshold, and nameless, into Cinderlight Spire. 

\---

Vintel is having the time of her life.

First of all, _she loves this fucking house_.

It's difficult to put her fingertip exactly on why, save that it's _older_ in a way than Silvermoon proper, as if the city beyond these walls were a watered down version of what used to be. This is richer. It is draperies of burnt gold and blood red, crushed velvet, furniture hewn from the amber-gold wood of the likes she's never seen. It is the supple, coal-black pelt of what she _thinks_ must actually have been a unicorn, on which she is stretched out in front of the fire, currently drying from the bath - given that its head is mounted over the mantle, a ruby the size of her fist set into the sockets. 

Looming as if over the shoulder of an ornately-carved chair and desk inlaid with black opal, a portrait of the Cinderlight matriarch of old is centred upon the wall, watching the room with an almost palpable aura of severity. 

It's Vintel's - _strictly profession, mind you_ \- opinion that Ollume Cinderlight is a _milf_. As similar as she is dissimilar to her daughter, all silver-blue eyes, the woman in that portrait rises at least a half-meter over the man whose shoulder her hand rests upon. Is svelte, with deceptively slender shoulders beneath black silk and cheekbones that could _cut glass_ , her countenance all sharp contours and blood-red lips through which the shadow of a scar tracks. Stygian hair slicked back to her scalp makes her look as sleek and dangerous as the sword held loosely in her opposite hand, which Vintel doubts is merely ornamental.

Ithilion, she presumes the man to be, is shorter than his wife by a head and a touch slighter. Pale as the winter sun, he middles between silver and gold, with eyes the colour of damp stone and hair shorn short along the sides. His face, however, is wracked by the branches of scar that cut across it - the like of which she has only seen in the aftermath of a lightning strike.

It had not occurred to her until seeing them, until her slow perusal of the contents of that desk, that the Cinderlights may have been mage-breakers. It would explain some of the gaps in information, the redactions that she found within the Convocations records, and certainly much of the family's difficult reputation, even outside their heir's feud with the prince. It would also explain _much_ , including their untimely deaths in the old wars.

A difficult legacy.

Vintel rolls over onto her side and cants her head slightly, watches as the portrait's eyes seem to follow her. She isn't certain how to feel about that, but there are other things to do now, on what she's starting to consider her most posh - and certainly most personally motivated - recon mission. She wonders, drying her hair a scarce measure further with a warm towel, what it must be like to live with all your history in plain view like this.

How many memories linger within this spire like spirits, haunting all the spaces that they used to fill.

She takes her time in combing out her damp, honey-blonde hair between her fingers. It still carries the scent of Morilinde's shampoo, of vanilla and dried roses from her prolonged soak in the baths. And she could have _lived there_ , up to her chin in the hot water, which never chilled despite her languishing. She should have taken up with a mage _ages ago_. The whole of this bloody tower simmers with the _arcane_ , hot and heady in the air, as if the Sunwell had bled into the very stone. It sings beneath her skin, chases away the last remnants of drowsiness she feels. 

With one last, parting look toward the portrait on the far wall, her expression thoughtful, Vintel moseys toward the adjacent room and into the closet, sifts through what seems an endless array of silk robes to find one that - she presumes - must be meant for sleep and not daily wear. It's long enough to not look wholly indecent, but only just, given their height difference, but she's not keen to touch the black silks in the back which look more appropriate her statue.

Not after the portrait.

She supposes you can't just climb into a girl's bed dressed like her dead mother.

But you _absolutely_ can wear one of her robes in a far more scandalous fashion, as Vintel proves, the front barely closed and the hem rippling around her mid-thigh as she makes her way down the spiral staircase two, then three steps at a time, intent on finding the kitchens for a snack. And that's easily achieved, the intrepid rogue soon back on her way toward the bedchambers above with a bit of fresh flatbread spread with honey and preserves. 

She polishes off the last little bit before she reaches the door, licks the honey from her fingers before easing it open. There are voices on the balcony, drifting in from the open door, one summer-warm and the other coolly silken. Windrunner must have _finally_ arrived, she muses as she plumps the pillows and slides beneath the sheets, nestling down with a contented sound in the dead centre of the bed. It's low to the floor in typical Silvermoon fashion, but soft as anything, and she sinks several inches into the down-filled mattress with the action.

Arms folded behind her head, she stretches languidly, gauges the time by the miniature suns that revolve on their axis in the brass lanterns overhead, casting dapples of amber light across the walls. Conversation filters in softly, and she could call them in, but it would ruin the surprise of it. Still, it's nice to listen. To hear the soft rise and fall of teasing banter from just outside.

She is pleasantly content when question comes: _Where is Vintel?_

_It won't be much longer._

_**Good.** _

But it comes chased with another emotion. One that's unfamiliar in more ways than it isn't, makes her brow knit softly for the way it sounds in the cool breeze coming off the balcony. She's accustomed to hearing conversation about herself in her presumed absence, but not that fond. Not in a softly accented voice that makes it sound that she were an facet that could be _missed_.

Vintel is much more intimately acquainted with the part that comes afterward, and her vantage point on the bed threatens to be the best decision she's made tonight. She wouldn't need to _understand_ Old Thalassian to know that an accord has been made, a rule gently broken. It's written in the soft break in conversation, the softer sound of leathers and silk. Her ear shifts subtly to catch at the sound, and _Belore_ , does she love that.

Almost as much as she loves the cool crispness of the breeze drifting in, how it carries with it the scent of balsam and leather, of vanilla and rosewater, of the leaves and the rain as the skies above the forest beyond break. It carries _them_ with it, and that is even better, because she of all the things that she anticipated of her eve, it was never quite _this_.

Not, "I want you out of these," in a timbre that shivers like a wild thing of the wood, low and powerful and lean beneath the branches. Not how Windrunner is all smooth, defined muscle when she strides in, her every step forward making Morilinde take two back, and those eyes aglow in grey-gold as she rides the hem of silken robes up those hips with her palms. 

_Vintel wonders how they feel._

Not, " _Then take them off_ ," in a cadence somehow smoother than all the silk that comes to pool upon the floor without any pause, without a moment's hesitation. With silver eyes _molten_ as they look up behind those white lashes. _Without an ounce of shame_ , as if Morilinde were only waiting for one worth _doing just that._

She can almost see the gooseflesh when it runs over that milky complexion, chases the places that bow-calloused hands touch. The thumb that brushes the underside of a breast, following the hem of the lace hidden beneath abandoned silks. And of course there would be lace beneath it. And of course it would be intricate as anything, because what is Morilinde if not old money, tarnished reputation like blackened gold. 

_It's beautiful._

_They're both beautiful_ , and she finds herself rising up on her elbows to watch, wishing she knew what it was like to be in that energy. In the place between gold and leather, silver and lace, where she most belongs. It makes her mouth dry, an ear twitch, a molten warmth to settle low and familiar in her in this bed that isn't hers, all crushed velvet and cool, airy sheets. 

When Windrunner bends in, the scars that chase her shoulders ripple in the lantern-light overhead, the shift of lithe muscle leaves shadows she wants to trace. When Windrunner leans in, those dawn-grey eyes meet _hers_ over a slender shoulder, and she feels an instant, visceral reaction. A pang of jealousy for them both, a desperate desire to be both the pale column of that neck and the line of ivory teeth that find it, leave mottled marks of dusk-blue and amaranthine in their wake. _Make Morilinde's breath hitch like **that**_.

Her fingers twitch against the duvet, curl into it almost against her will when she hears Sylvanas emit a low sound against the pulse-point, not quite a growl and not _not_. It's possessive. It is deeply unfair that Morilinde _lets her_ like that. Deeply unfair and _everything_ at the same time, because she can see how slender fingers have slid into Sylvanas's hair now, as if to keep her there as she does it _again_.

But then they slide languidly lower, down the nape of a neck and across Sylvanas's shoulders, and she can tell from the shift in the ranger's ears how good that must feel, perfectly-manicured nails hard and smooth all at once as they trail over all that pale golden skin. As they trace the line of a scar along the plane of the hip, and a muscle in Sylvanas's side tenses subtly for it. 

She's aware that she's holding her breath now, because Morilinde's touch is trailing downward and so is _she_. Because silvery eyes are looking _up_ , but pale lips are brushing a kiss to a toned stomach, then just beneath the navel and it makes her think that Cinderlight is about to get on her knees, and _Belore_ , unless she wants to ruin her smallclothes right now, she cannot think about that.

Instead, she's watching perfectly manicured nails _unlace boots_ and toss them to the side, _unfasten_ the boar-tusk buttons of leather trousers as Morilinde rises once more, and uses a belt-loop to draw Sylvanas back with her, into another deep kiss as they take a few slow steps toward the bed. _Toward her._

It gives her a first-row view of the way that bow-calloused palms slide over those hips and grip a perfect ass, honestly, how they tangle with the hem of a lace waistband shortly thereafter, and she thinks it might rip. That would be _delightful_. She wants it to happen, exhales in a slow breath. She isn't expecting the way that Sylvanas's ears _snap back_ of a sudden, the moment of perfect tension elicited by the glitter of gold between the two elves, a flashfire instant in which one of those hands remains where it is and the other _takes Cinderlight by the throat_.

_A knife._

The moment of recognition sings dangerously in her veins, prickles the hair at the nape of Vintel's neck. A honeyed blade with a handle carved from a tine of antler, the one that Sylvanas kept tucked in her boot and is now within a slender hand. Neither of them heard the whisper of metal on leather. Neither of them, and now two have reached an impasse, Sylvanas looming over the slighter elf like a golden god, dawn-grey eyes as powerful as a thunderstorm on a summer's day. As if Cinderlight could have toppled an empire so easily from the bedroom. 

But those silver eyes are aglow despite the storm on the horizon, a soft breath shakes in that slender slip of a thing, as they dip down toward the hand at her throat. It was never enough to dissuade. She has never been so certain that Morilinde has no idea what she's done, no concept of _who she's dealing with_ , as when the handle presses into Windrunner's open palm and pale fingers slide between gilded ones on it. 

As when, hand-in-hand and never breaking eye contact, Morilinde guides the edge of that honeyed blade beneath a ribbon of black lace at her shoulder and breathes, "I trust you have it from here, _anarore_?"

The tension fades in slow increments, an ease in the line of lean shoulders, the way that Sylvanas's lips brush a kiss to the other's temple, chaste as anything. Almost tender as the hold on a throat eases, as an amber-kissed thumb strokes the line of a pale jaw. As blade slides through lace - a clean cut. 

The words, "Be good for me," murmured into silken tresses with all the warmth of an early summer as Windrunner slips the flat of it beneath the other side in a practiced motion, let's the cool metal linger a moment against warmer skin. Sylvanas could field-dress a doe in ten minutes. 

Vintel loves and hates how she takes her time instead, drawing it out for all of them. She knows that the contrast between cold metal and the warm lips that brush where it touched must be divine, can hear the soft, shuddering exhalation of breath it elicits, and the sound is sweet. 

_And this should not have been so breathtakingly hot for a matter of national security._

It isn't as sweet as the directive from Windrunner, low and heady in Morilinde's ear, "Get into bed."

Or the way that silver eyes flick over Sylvanas's countenance, the hint of pink that dusts pale cheekbones when Morilinde finally, finally turns toward the bed and _sees her there_ , and those pale lips curl up at the corner _just so_ , almost imperceptible on the way over.

_Vintel is in trouble._

She doesn't know precisely how much trouble until a hand finds her sternum and presses her up against the mattress, room made for Cinderlight in her lap, knees sinking in at either side of her hips. She is starting to suspect, feels the words catch in her throat, when a curtain of ivory tresses spills around her like so much silk, an instant before those soft lips brush to hers. And _fuck_ , if Morilinde doesn't smell good, like vanilla and rose and the _arcane_ , a palpable energy that sings just beneath her skin wherever they touch, dangerous and beautiful. 

Her borrowed silks are suddenly too much and not enough between them, all at once. And then she knows what it's like to have those perfectly manicured nails sliding up the back of her neck and against her scalp.

" _Fuck me_." Vintel exhales like an oath when they part, only just, her head falling back against the pillows. Her ear shifts as a fingertip ghosts along the edge of it, sending coils of warmth through her and making her bite her lower lip not to make a sound. "Took you bloody long enough."

"You liked it," is what Sylvanas retorts from near the dresser, leather breeches folded atop it as the other slowly strips off the remainder of their clothes.

And Vintel did: _does_. She does like it.

A fresh rush of heat rushes beneath her skin at a nip to her ear, and she can feel the colour as it starts to spread, creeping down her neck and chest toward her navel. As it becomes a wet warmth between her thighs, all the worse for it when there's a smooth murmur of, "It might," into the shell of her ear like the best kind of threat.

Milky skin is so soft beneath her fingertips, warm as she traces them slowly down the other's sides, just as slowly back up. A nose brushes to hers once, twice, and she inhales softly when she's kissed again just as slow. But her touch cannot wander any further, Morilinde's slender fingers sliding around her wrists and pressing them just so into the mattress above her head with the quiet instruction, "Keep them there, kitten."

She is completely out of her depth, completely in it, cannot help the way that her hips lift a scarce measure at the demand despite herself. She doesn't even have anything clever to say, this once, and that won't do at all. It makes her want to do something fresh. It makes her want to shove some porcelain off an end table, steal another kiss, maybe get railed into this mattress one, two, twenty-seven times tonight. 

Definitely that last one.

Definitely.

A sentiment that only increases when the mattress dips, a pang of anticipation racing through her when a lankier frame settles beside them. All smooth muscle beneath a complexion of amber-gold, Sylvanas carries with her the scent of balsam and leather, of metal and sun-warmed skin. Is nothing but relentless self-assuredness and does what she does best - commands without ever needing to utter the words. Instead, it's the knuckle that tips Morilinde's chin up to steal another kiss, as if the ranger had not quite had her fill of that.

She can see the hint of pink that touches the pale arc of those cheekbones for it, the slow smile between them before silvery eyes avert, and the way Sylvanas laughs softly for it, as if winning the oldest sort of game. Maybe she is, to elicit that reaction after all else.

Vintel understands that, perhaps more than most, feels it low and warm at the centre of her when those subtly calloused fingertips find her jaw, turn her to look up into those dawn-coloured eyes, like heather and wheat, like the storm and what sunders it. It's not difficult to understand, to know where you are when you're looked at like that. To sink into it, like the faint hint of woodsmoke that lingers in all that mess of pale gold hair.

A soft nip touches her upper lip, barely a hint of teeth and the wind-chapped lips that brush there after. And it's already over, in every way that has ever mattered. It's over the way it should always have been over, and all she can breathe and taste and sense is Sylvanas. It is over well before their teeth click softly together, before those lean arms hold her down against the mattress, before a leaner thigh presses between her own and the pleasant friction that elicits that makes her arch back into the warm body above her. 

She is aware, only just, of the hushed conversation that occurs between hot, open-mouthed kisses, in the span of shuddering breaths, of the way the words lilt like an old melody, sing somewhere deep within her. Of a question Windrunner asks, not to her, that she never quite catches, and the way the cool cadence above her answers makes her breath hitch against Sylvanas's lips, a silken intonation of, " _I'd like to watch_."

And then there are strong hands on her hips and she's moved, breathless in the wake of all of that, her head and shoulders into Morilinde's lap, a mess of honey-blonde hair against all that ivory. And then slender fingers are curling around her wrists, and she shivers at the brush of cool lips to the curve of her knuckles, tender as anything. Her breath is a gust when they brush her temple next, a sharp juxtaposition to much warmer ones and the hint of teeth, the way that Sylvanas is taking her time, blazing the world's most thorough trail from her chest toward her navel.

She's nominally certain at this point in that not even a Titan could stop Silvermoon's most elusive Windrunner from fucking the life out of her until morning, and honestly, even if it kills her, she thinks that's a sacrifice she's more than willing to make. Has a leg over a lean archer's shoulder and feels the warm exhalation on her hip bone when she feels, more than sees, the way that both of them _freeze_.

Perhaps it's odd that Morilinde is the first one to still, that silver eyes narrow of a sudden as if sensing something unseen, intangible. But it's odder still when Sylvanas's ear flicks back, brushes intimately against the inside of her thigh as the ranger asks in an all-too-serious timbre, "Were you expecting-"

"I was _not_ ," Morilinde's cadence is beyond crisp at that, it's lilt permeated by the distant sound of footsteps in these halls, only just heard above the humming in her own blood, the trembling of her own breath. Then... _whistling?_ as they make their way down toward the closed door with a jaunty tune on their lips.

And did she lock the door before-

It doesn't matter, not with the way that ice encrusts the mechanism at the sound of a lazy knock upon it. A rush of the arcane, one that brims beneath ivory skin everywhere it touches her, makes her want more of it. She can breathe it in, and it smells of rosewater and vanilla, enticingly of dark earth. See it, in the faint incandescence in silver-blue eyes as they stare daggers at the closed door. 

"Moril?" the timbre that sounds from the other side is as smooth as anything, but masculine. "Isn't it early for you to be in bed? Lor'themar sent me on leave early. Would you like some help in the garden tonight?"

Morilinde licks a lower lip slowly as if to wet it, elegant countenance unreadable as she asserts simply, "Noas," in the same moment that Sylvanas mutters something against her tawny skin that sounds suspiciously like, " _Lor'themar_."

Silvery eyes drift over them both before that cooler voice asserts, "I am occupied."

There's the soft thump of a forehead upon the door, and she wonders if this may be a frequent situation as Noas calls through it, "Are you really not going to come out and see me? It's been three months, Moril. The least you could do is-"

A flutter of ivory lashes. The soft exhalation of a sigh, and Morilinde's cadence is tight with the answer, "I have company."

Outside the door, a snort can be heard, and the Cinderlight brother's timbre is marked with a seemingly genuine mirth as he asserts, "Sure you do. And I'm the Ranger-General."

Vintel cannot help the way that her gaze darts up at that, toward Sylvanas's grey-and-gold. Sylvanas, who has the seemingly common courtesy to place a bow-calloused palm over her mouth before she starts to laugh, shoulders shaking helplessly. She can't help it.

"It's fine I suppose. I'll just spend my first night of leave lonely and-"

She really can't.

By the time that he wheedles - "I was going to make tartlets?" - Vintel can scarcely breathe. And whatever oath that Morilinde murmurs beneath her breath must be _horrid_ , because Sylvanas's ears tilt up in surprise well before the paler elf slips out from beneath her. It is with some annoyance in every action that Cinderlight makes her way toward the closet to select a _high-collared_ robe, combs her fingertips through ivory hair to smooth it, and actually _checks herself over in the mirror_ before glancing back at them.

"I will return shortly," and there's exasperation there, Morilinde's cadence soft in sharp contrast to the severity in those silver eyes. It makes her wonder what is occurring behind them. Casual contemplation of fratricide, perhaps, with the way a sheet of frost shatters sharply to allow the other into the hall. 

"Did you _ice the door_ again?" Noas asks from outside of it.

"Are the farstriders educating you in manners? It seemed prudent after-" 

The sound of voices start to fade down the hall.

"That was _six hundred_ years ago-"

The bow-calloused hand has still not removed itself by the time the bickering of siblings has all but disappeared, so she bites it gently, sees the amusement in dawn-grey eyes before Sylvanas's touch recedes. Vintel laughs breathlessly at that, wipes at her eyes with the heel of her hand as she observes, "And here it was going so well."

Windrunner sprawls out at her side, languid as a forest lynx, tilts over to press a kiss to her cheek, "It was."

"I really thought," Vintel turns to look at the other better in the dim light, steely blue eyes half-lid as her fingertips toy with a lock of pale golden hair. Her most mischievous smile is starting to show, curls further at the corner with the confession, "That I was going to get my hands on Silvermoon's most eligible ass tonight. Then I could brag to Velonara."

_That_ gets her pushed back over into the pillows, into a friendly tussle that she's happy to lose, particularly with the way those arms are draped around her and Sylvanas is chuckling in her ear. Particularly when the ranger releases her hands, asserts simply, "You'd best take your chance while you have it."

Then she just does, and it's not at all disappointing.

Rock solid perfection.

_Chef's kiss._

Vintel is nominally certain that it is, in fact, the finest ass in all of Silvermoon, and informs Windrunner of that while she watches the other run a bath in the deep, bronze basin behind one of the room's many partitions. And she has the distinct impression from the way those dawn-grey eyes sweep over her, the faint raise of a brow and the curl at the corner of those lips that Sylvanas _already knows it_.

"Old houses," Windrunner intones with a satisfied sigh, sinking down into the steaming water once it's ready and closing her eyes. She looks comfortable, content, pleased as if surprised that she is able to sink so low. Then, "You should wash up before you have to bed down sticky."

"Whose fault is that?" Vintel retorts with a frown, arms folded on the side of the basin and her chin propped on them. She flicks a bit of water at the taller woman, a mischievous smile curling over her features as those dawn-grey eyes slip open to look at her, and asks with a put-upon seriousness, "You think she actually uses this? Seems a bit deep. She might drown."

"Noas's," Sylvanas answers with conviction, but her hand lifts to brush a few strands of honey-blonde hair out of Vintel's eyes, the touch warm and damp. "Rest assured, I'd have cleaned up after."

Vintel arches a brow pointedly, looks toward the bath, then toward Sylvanas. Plays her cards with a sly, "You still could."

Summer-warm laughter fills the air.

"Get in the tub."

\---- 

It is much later, comfortable between one form and another beneath that impossibly soft duvet, freshly done with her midnight pastries, that Vintel thinks she could get used to this - interruptions and all. To the comfortable weight of an arm draped over her, and the way that Windrunner's head is tucked over hers on the pillow as they converse lowly in the night, languid with the promise of sleep. To the cool fingertips stroking through her hair, the way her cheek is to Morilinde's chest, listening to the soft thrum of a heartbeat beneath fresh silks. 

And it wasn't the way that this evening was supposed to end, but she loves it all the same, stretching a little and feeling the kiss brushed to the crown of her head for it. She can vaguely tell that the discussion centers around Dalaran, could care less what about as long as she's still receiving attention. 

Still, it's easy enough to tease against that collarbone in a pause, "I met a really cute-smelling mage today."

There is a soft, brief-lived sound of offense from beneath the silks under her cheek, the stilling of fingertips within her hair at that, one that makes her tilt her head up only just enough to meet that silvern gaze, pout, trembling lower lip and everything. 

Steel-blue eyes wide and shimmering as she shimmies a little closer, but her heart full of guile, Vintel intones in her most disarming voice against the line of a slender jaw, "Don't be mad, petal." And then with a pleasant laugh, all languid mischief as she nips it lightly, "You're too pretty to be mad."

Vintel finds her chin lightly taken in hand for that, lifted so that the other elf can look at her. Finds herself scolded with a surprisingly gentle, "No," and turns her cheek into the palm of Morilinde's hand instead. A thumb strokes up and along her cheekbone, and that's so nice, even as a cool cadence above her asserts, "I ought to make you sleep on the floor."

With an honesty that surprises even herself, Vintel replies, "I don't want to sleep alone tonight."

It smells, somehow, more floral here. It smells of roses and vanilla, enticingly of a hint of the arcane in the cool evening air, and she bcomes all the more aware of it as it seems to become more present. Soothing. It makes her want _very badly_ to shift forward, to bury her countenance in the column of the other's neck and seek it at the source.

And she does. Finds little protest at the action, in spite of the paler elf's previous statement. Instead, a cool hand finds the nape of her neck once more, draws smooth nails over the back of it in a way that makes the hair rise and the skin of her shoulders prickle. 

"You smell _so_ good," Vintel murmurs softly, craning into the touch when a thumb strokes up the back of her neck, then repeats the action slowly once more. And she could not say what it was about it, like sinking into liquid silver, but it turns her languid all at once and eases the tension from her bones. But she drinks it in like water after a thousand years in the desert, exhales in a contented sigh as her eyelids grow heavy.

"You didn't." 

She doesn't miss the copper thread of mirth in Sylvanas's voice, the hint of laughter just withheld. 

"I did," comes the succinct answer in a silken cadence. And then, with an uncharacteristic humor, "You could sleep on the floor."

"Maybe I don't want to sleep alone, either," is the last thing that she hears before it all drifts to black.

It is a dreamless sleep.

An easy one.

The best night's rest she's had since she can remember.


End file.
